Tag: beach

Roses on the Beach

Pic is from my trip to Crosby in June.

Something very gothic romance about it.

I think of a young man in 19th century, perhaps a newly qualified lawyer with good prospects, coming to Liverpool to meet the woman he loves, who is to arrive on a ship from America. He buys a bouquet of roses, of course, for roses are her favourite flowers. The ship docks, the passengers disembark, but his beloved is not among them. Heartbroken, the young lawyer suspects she fell in love with another man. He dumps the flowers on the sandy beach and swears never to love again. To escape his disappointment, he leaves for an expedition to West Africa, where he meets his death.

The young lady, his beloved, has in truth not fallen in love with anyone else. She never boarded the ship. Her best friend has had an accident and the young lady rushed to be by her side, as this friend was like a sister to her. She wrote a letter to the young lawyer, explaining she would make the voyage as soon as her friend recovered. How was she to know the young man never read her letter, for he had left before he could have received it?

When she finally arrives to England, she hears of her young man’s death in West Africa and cries many a tear. She vows never to love again, converts to Catholicism and becomes a nun.

Luckily, there’s another version of this story, where the young lawyer has a sister, who tells him he’s being an idiot and that he should trust his beloved–if she was not on the ship, there was probably a good reason and no doubt soon some news would come. Which it does. He reads the letter and it makes him love his beloved even more. “Isn’t she just the best, look how she cares about her friend!” he gushes to his sister. The sister wears her biggest told-you-so face.

Some weeks later, the lovely lady at last arrives on another ship, he waits for her with a fresh bouquet of roses. They get married and live happily ever after.

Crosby Beach

I thought it was about time I went to the seaside again.

Crosby is a town in Merseyside, near Liverpool, on the same coast as Southport and Formby, both of which have featured here before. (In fact, it was to Southport I went, and from there I took a train to Crosby.)

This beach also has statues!

It is a work by Antony Gormley called Another Place. The statues are spread out along the beach, as you can see some of them quite far out into the sea.

It would be interesting to watch them get submerged in the water as the tide comes.

Sand dunes.

Seagulls.

Ship!

And sky, of course.

Formby

In my last blog entry I shared the photos from my trip to Southport, but that wasn’t the whole trip. That same day, I also visited Formby, a town on the coast near Liverpool. Formby is known for its sand dunes, pinewoods and wildlife–apparently it’s a habitat of the endangered red squirrel, though I haven’t seen any (truth be told, I didn’t have much time, I literally ran from the train station to the beach, took pics and ran back, as it was quite late and I wanted to return to Manchester at reasonable hour).

Anyway, Formby is absolutely gorgeous, see for yourselves:

formby beach2

formby beach1

formby path

formby dunes

formby dunes2

formby pinewoods

The pinewoods are conserved by National Trust, for the above mentioned wildlife.

Southport Beach

Today, let me share with you some photos from my trip to Southport. Southport is a seaside town in Merseyside, North West England, over an hour by train from Manchester.

southport beach1

southport beach2

southport seagull

southport beach3

southport beach4

southport beach5

The bottom two are smartphone shots.

This trip meant a lot to me because this was the first time in ten years that I felt seawater. The tide was low as you can see, so I just took off my shoes and socks and went right in. I walked way, way past the pier. Of course, not being used to such hot weather (yeah, what’s up with that?) since moving to UK and not having been on the beach for a decade, I forgot I should have applied the sun cream regularly. Shrug, a bit of a sunburn won’t kill me.

Anyone here knows Souhtport?