WINNER: PODDLER POOL
Our New Nature Writer of the Year for 2021 is Caro Fentiman from Northumberland. With a background in theatre and education, Caro is now a musician and writer, focusing mainly on parenting and the arts. “I am delighted to have had my nature writing acknowledged,” she said. “Much of my work is inspired by the Northumbrian landscape and to have that read by a wider audience is really special.”
A white stag is painted on a crop of rocks below the lighthouse. When I see the antlers, flecked with rust-coloured algae, it means I am nearly there. Other people might want to turn back and marvel at Bamburgh Castle and the glossy beach below, but I’ve been here many times and know where the real treasure is hidden.
Poddler Pool lies at Black Rock Point, just before the white dazzle of Ross Sands. Gazing north, Lindisfarne Castle juts out on the horizon, and a swivel to the south reveals the Farne Islands, swelling with puffins in the summer months and a permanent home for colonies of grey seals. When the wind is blowing the right way, the ghostly moan of seal songs drifts across the water like a siren call.
To fully appreciate the joy of Poddler Pool, it is important to visit at low tide, when the water level is well below the brim. I would argue that this is the best swimming spot in the British Isles, an infinity pool in every sense of the word. The steep edges are hung with bladderwrack, covering a blanket of barnacles. The bottom of the pool is covered with large, rounded pebbles, rubbed sea-smooth. The perfect antidote to limpets.
Though the tide must be low, the weather can do what it likes, offering a different experience each time I visit. On a calm day, I carefully edge down into the pool: there is a natural step that makes lowering myself into the icy water a little less shocking. Rarely, the sun will have toasted my skin and taken the edge off the chill, and on those days there is nowhere nicer in the world. I push my body into the water, which possesses a strange, dense quality, and wrap it around me, rolling like a seal. Several sanderlings stand poised just metres
away, ready to rise as one in an impressive monochrome display. Oystercatchers turn the world technicolour, carrot beaks glinting in the light. On these balmy days I swim up and down in a kind of trance, my heart rate dropping lower and lower, until I am completely inhabiting that moment and my whole world exists within these seaweed curtains.
In Northumberland you can’t rely on the weather to be clement, but the skies are always endless and it’s fun to watch clouds chase each other as gaps of blue emerge. On a slate-grey day, with the sharp wind baring its teeth, it is almost a relief to shelter in Poddler Pool, though the water has a bite of its own. Gannets smash into the waves while a crow lends me a beady eye from a nearby rock. The sea smudges into the sky so it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins. And while I am lying on my back, white toes tingling, it doesn’t really matter. I am floating in a Turner painting.
There are days when even a low tide cannot protect Poddler Pool from the onslaught of splash and spray being hurled at it by the North Sea. There can be no meditative moments when I am surrounded by white noise and the Farne Islands are hidden behind a lingering mist. This is when the sea witch emerges, cackling and shrieking, diving amongst the sugar kelp, rocked by rogue waves tipping into the pool. Gulls circle overhead, buffeted by the wind, serenading me as I twist and spin in the churning brine.
Whatever the weather, I always leave a little piece of myself behind, emerging lighter somehow. As the white stag watches me walk away, I lick my lips and wear the salt on my skin like armour.