Brean Sands 1

Bad idea, going back. Perhaps. This place couldn’t be trusted. Dad’s fault – his warning story, repeated back then whenever we came. What happened, he’d said, was this: a boy playing on the dunes had dug a hole, tunnelling into the side of one of them and crawled in. Head first. He died of course. Suffocated in the collapse of a ton of loose sand. Swallowed by a hill of sand.

As a child I imagined his small legs, skinny like mine, sticking out, like the dead witch under the house in the Wizard of Oz. I shuddered. It was a long time ago. Today the dunes seemed diminished. What had once felt a Sahara by the sea: slope after sandy slope stretching along the edge of the beach, full of hidden ways and foxy corridors, beneath a low scrubby jungle of sea buckthorn, was now a thin strip of dirty piles, flecked with wrappers and cans and cartons, snagged on brambles, shaking in the wind – a forest of dirty leaves.

That was behind me. Ahead the real threat. The infamously treacherous, deceptively fast tide. A tide that could race across that vastness of beach, hungry for walkers and cars, for anyone who made a mistake with their time.

But I’d be alright. I’d checked. Setting out now, I could easily make it over the sand to the end of Brean Down. Drink eyefuls of sky, look across to Steep Holm, wave at South Wales. Plenty of time.