Here we are vaguely met with the year 2025, teetering on the very brink of a seemingly bottomless August, and I am almost 43 years old- which frankly seems ridiculous. I think it obscene that I have been allowed to linger on in this charade, so terribly long already.
Let us again consider one Angus Coast location, a place that has fascinated me for nigh-on 7 years. Limited, unassuming, and not so esoteric to be unrelatable to the accepted historical regions. Though bewitched and only sparsely productive of agate, it most certainly is.
Occasionally, as I have gingerly sidestepped through the grey and bright tumult of passing years, I have collected moss agates here, of a sort not usually encountered elsewhere. These can be, as is common at Balmerino also, "fragmentary membrane "agates, or "mossy" jasp-agates, or indeed plumed examples or mossy agates that conceal plumed sections, as if they were vignettes in some fantastic frieze or multi-panelled painting. Though, as of writing, only one plumed agate "in excelsis" has shown up, while only one other mossy agate with occasional forays into plumed territories, has been made manifest. Others, of a less remarkable nature, have been featured on this website. The fact they originate at this location, can be noted by the Roman Numeric "II" being placed below the "back" button next to the initial featured photo of each.
It's an isolated conspiration of coves. Both to the north and south, immediately following the extensive banks of shingle, a rather macabre and unkind sort of coast is encountered. Rough, scarified grotesques of sandstone stand sentinel, in otherworldly relief, often overhanging and Martian. Indeed, I recently attempted to explore further coves to the north and discovered a treacherous way ahead, where scrambling is a perilous necessity. Some places here are only passable at low tide, while others are always impassable without rope, harness or piton, or a rigorous plain disregard for safety. With this in mind, it's important to remember, that in surroundings such as these, every single knot or precarious clutch of pebbles becomes important, as isolated deposits are always possible. Here however, I believe I have only one remaining to discover, and I do not know if it can be reached on foot. The chances of it revealing anything new, are very slim.
You are never far from hearth and home while crab stepping along the Angus Coast, but while you may be separated from such by mere hundreds of feet, these distances equal vast cold vacuums of void in amidst a thick, swirling reverie of Haar, with the level and solid ground above seeming a part of a distant land. It's certainly easier now, in glorious hindsight, to recall such subversions of this place's barbaric nature, while sat warm in the car's cockpit, or sofa-settled, rather than being there and feeling the tangible dread dark of the place, swamping every pore and tangled edge. Once encountered, it can be instantly brought to bear again upon the mind, like a smothering black wing.
I don't know if anyone else has felt that way, and in many cases I suspect not. I'd rather I felt light and jovial while there, because this would benefit me immensely. Is it the place, or is it the pomp and melodrama borne of my little spotty hide divining meaning and profundity where there is none? Self-important, self-regarding, white-boy entitled psychobabble leading us half-shod, blindfold through the surf with a shaggy dog in the sybaritic dark?
I saw my first ever Fritillary butterfly here, of the Dark Green variety. Together with a Spectacle that circled it, before they both swooped upward caught in a balmy updraft while I was still muddling through tick-ridden ferns, slipping bramble claws and watching the glimmer of the low sun in empty bottles caught in a knot of tussocks.
A weave of honeysuckle runs up fuchsia-pink through the sea of fern, and one can rest a moment in the trampled spaces where the roe deer have bedded-down, and entice ladybirds to flight with a breath or pluck the haws from your sodden shoes. All this vegetative finery has somehow overthrown the red screes below. A loose stone beneath might on occasion mislead an unwary foot, and one can imagine tearing up all this wild herbage to reveal the bloody mess beneath that nonetheless as a result would be easier to negotiate. Once you have reached the high pioneering gorse, a few feet beneath the field, you know you're out of the worst of it, and all that remains is to penetrate a series of tractor trails through the crop till you're again sad and domesticated by the pummelled aggregate path.
I rather think I went at it too hard a while, with too much intensity. It's a very personal intensity, much like a childhood fixation on one thing or another. I began with earthworms, and progressed to spiders, with occasional diversions into crustaceans when opportunity arose, and ascended again into the lepidoptera, finishing with a flourish, in Agate. I'm very much still there, though slowly futility is consuming the venom of youth.
I went at it too hard a while. By nature I re-evaluate finds, that is to say, everything that is of interest, while I am still on the beach, again at home, repeatedly once cut and even then when carefully or carelessly treasured in some wholesome nook, I will re-examine everything over and over and over again. Often this will lead to photography and then again I will become aware of every detail I have missed. It's a precious, torturous, sentimentally overwrought process, imbued with a convoluted nostalgia. It's utterly ridiculous; these are inanimate curiosities that I can only hope to damage and then to insufficiently portray, but what else is there but to try and try and try again. Like Rob Roy's Meta Menardi, as a fable it's cute, it's even elegant, but hopelessly inaccurate. There are so many failings in-between, that if mentioned would discourage even the most bullishly devious of scholars and gentlemen.
Why do I do it? There are answers everywhere here, and we are so consumed and so surrounded that it is easy to become complacent, spoiled, jaded by the incredible heft of nature's ingenuity. I discard agates now that I would have salivated over once, only scant years ago. It's sick, it's sad, it's facile but it's necessary because of the preciousness of time to be so. Even now I'm considering what agates I have cut and strewn about nearby and if they're worth a polish, or a photo. I remember the excitement of their procurement and then the guilt in their crude revealing by blade. That guilt borne of the knowledge that I have already found enough material of similar appearance, so here I am disregarding a perfectly acceptable piece, just as ancient, incredibly extant and valid as another, because my eyes only seek that wicked jolt of the unknown now. Beauty is just glitter, and rarity assumes we have a name for what we think it is. I demand wonders.