#silloth

Tennis Holidays at LNER Reorts

Scarborough, Felixstowe, Frinton, Silloth and North Berwick - A few of the noted centres.

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Elizabeth Burns

Love unfolded then, like crumpled petals opening into sunlight, unfurling at the stroke of spring

as we walked the seven miles of estuary, reaching, after long mudflats, the beach, the windless bay, the candle of the lighthouse, waxen in the hazy air that hung like gauze between us and the islands

and through an undertow of sea-mist came the warmth of April sun nuzzling at our dazzled, new-born skin

until, at dusk, the madder of the sky shed splintered light on wrinkled waves and sea breathed inland, mingling damp salt air with the scent of wild narcissi.

Fragments of this day remain: primroses, pressed in a book, a sea-stained map, and memories, clearer than photographs, of glances, places, shades of light

and of your touch, when, swift as seabirds’ wings, you flew into the inlet of my arms.

(Above the estuary, the pale moon shifts, and the tide, like a bale of cloth unfolded, is pulled towards the land, a swathe of rippled silk, spilling over sand, easing under the hulls of fishing boats and brushing the tips of bulrushes, edging inland as far as it can reach – until, gathered into narrowed, earthbound arms, seawater blurs into river, a rush of it flowing from Galloway hills, down into this saltmouth that it floods with freshwater, licking at the briny tongue until the dawn, when, drawn by the moon’s odd magnet, the tide slips back towards the shore).

After seven years of plenty we’re walking back along this shore-road where the primroses are flowering again and our hearts, new-milked each morning, are still brim-full of love.

Out on the acres of the estuary’s wet sand the shelducks catch the springlight on their wings, and south, past Silloth, the hills make the pearl-grey outline of another country.

Inland is a darkness of sorrel and wild garlic, a deep green scattered by the stars of wood anemones’ white flowers, and in a hedgerow, frail as eggshell, are nested five new violets.

Such things become the sediment of memory, the layers we gather over years, flecked with the bright silt of omen