The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [19]
From the front of the house a path leads along a steep-sided rocky causeway, a sort of natural drawbridge, to what is dignified by the name of ‘the coast road’. It is a tarmac road, but the kind where grass tends to grow in the middle. It is, even in May, little frequented by motor cars. I may add here that one of the secrets of my happy life is that I have never made the mistake of learning to drive a car. I have never lacked people, usually women, longing to drive me whithersoever I wanted. Why keep bitches and bark yourself? Below the causeway, on either side, there is a wilderness of small rocks, piled higgledy-piggledy by nature, and not accessible to the sea. This is a less attractive scene and not without a few rusty tins and broken bottles which I must one day climb down and remove. Beyond the road the humpy yellow rocks, some of them extremely large, appear again, here set in wiry springy grass and among innumerable flaring gorse bushes. There are also (placed there by man or nature?) quite a lot of skinny fuchsias and dense veronicas, all in flower, and some kind of rather attractive grey-leaved sage. Beyond this ‘shrubbery’ there is a more barren heathland, covered with gorse and heather, and containing treacherous boggy pools, evil-smelling and full of a virulent green and reddish moss. I have not yet explored this inland country. I am not a ‘great walker’, and I am absorbed and contented by my seaside paradise. Upon this heath, incidentally, and about a mile and a half from Shruff End, is the nearest dwelling, a place called Amorne Farm. From my upstairs front windows I can see their lights at night.
The coast road, if followed to the right, curves round into the next bay, which is invisible from Shruff End territory, except at the tower which stands on the promontory. Here, at a distance of three or four miles, is an establishment called the Raven Hotel about which I have mixed feelings since it is a place of some pretension which attracts tourists. The bay itself is very beautiful, being fringed by rather remarkable, almost spherical boulders. It is known locally as ‘Raven Bay’ after the hotel, though it has some other name, something like ‘Shahore’ in the local dialect. (Shore Bay? Why?) If followed to the left from Shruff End, the coast road passes through a curious narrow defile, which I have nicknamed ‘the Khyber Pass’, where the way has been cut through a big outcrop of rock, which here invades the land to a considerable distance. Beyond this there is a very small stony beach; this is the only beach in the area, since elsewhere, a feature which originally attracted me to this coastline, there is deepish water up against the rocks at any state of the tide. Beyond the beach a footpath leads diagonally to the village which is set a little inland, but if one continues to follow the road one reaches a very pretty little harbour with a magnificently built crooked stone quay, all silted up and entirely abandoned. There used to be fishing boats here, I gather, but these now operate only from further north: I sometimes see them upon my otherwise remarkably empty tract of sea. Beyond the harbour a long and quite broad shelving slope has been cut in the rock to form what is known as ‘the ladies’ bathing place’. I have seen no ladies there, only occasionally a few boys. (The local people hardly ever swim; they seem to regard the activity as a form of madness.) In fact ‘the ladies’ bathing place’ is now so overgrown with slippery brown weed and so strewn with boulders tossed in by the sea that it is scarcely ‘safer’ than anywhere else. The coast road here becomes a track (unfortunately suitable for motor cars) which climbs up into a wild region, which I have not yet had time to explore, where my yellow rocks turn into handsome and quite sizeable cliffs. The tarmac road turns inland to the village and beyond.
The village is called Narrowdean. The old form