Along the foreshore
Moving through the liminal space where sea meets land, we’re immersed in a transitory world.
Walking along the foreshore never gets old. Where else can you leave footprints on land that exists only fleetingly, at the discretion of the moon?
For a few hours this half-term holiday, our footprints meandered across Sandy Bay. Six years had passed since we’d visited this Porthcawl beach; recent trips had taken us to nearby Rest Bay, for the surfing, and Kenfig, to walk the dunes and sands of Sker.
On our last visit to Sandy Bay, we rented fatbikes and left tyre tracks instead of footprints. Corum said he had wondered whether to bother opening his shop that morning; it was still term time in Wales and off-season. Luckily for us, he had decided to show up. He sorted us out with some bikes and we rolled out onto the low-tide beach.
With their wide tyres, the bikes were our moon buggies, carrying us over a landscape we’d never been able to ride before. We floated over soft sand, emboldened to experiment and see what terrain we could conquer next: bumping down slipways, splashing through rock pools, and slithering across a dune.
To ride on the beach is to leave behind the constraints of cycling on land – the traffic, the narrow paths, even the necessity of steering in a straight line – and enter a space of joyful possibility. Whenever I see other people pedalling wide-tyred bikes across the sand, it’s clear how much fun they’re having.