Beesands has a perpetual air of rejoicing, for on every fine day the waste between the sea and the one row of fishermen’s cottages flies its banners to sea and sky. It is only the domestic wash hung out to dry, but the effect is one of festival.
There is a something Irish in the look and the manners and customs of Beesands. The drying-ground of washing and of fishing-nets is rich in old tins and brickbats, and is populated numerously with fowls, housed as a rule in decayed boats turned keel upward. They are the most trustful cocks and hens in the world, and follow the fishermen into the inn and the cottages like dogs.
A tourist not preoccupied with the arts would inevitably style this a “miserable place,” a “wretched hole,” or other things uncomplimentary; but to a painter, wanting atmosphere and utter unconventionality, it is delightful. Poor fisherfolk are its only inhabitants, and its one inn neither offers accommodation to the tourist, nor, if it did, would he be likely to accept it. For one thing, strangers, either here or at the sister hamlet of Hall Sands are rare, both places being innocent of roads of any kind. Just a row of rude whitewashed cottages on the level: that is Beesands, and just a double row of somewhat superior cottages on the cliffside; that is Hall Sands.
A mile of climbing up cliff paths and scrambling down, and then across another scrubby bottom where the white campions grow, brings the adventurous stranger to Hall Sands, built into the tall dark cliffs, just as the house-martens plaster their nests against the eaves. The hardihood—the foolhardihood, if you like it better—that ever induced mortal man to build houses in this perilous position under the threatening eaves of the cliffs and on the margin of the waves can only be appreciated by those who look upon the place itself. It beggars description.
HALL SANDS.
The scene is one of a wild beauty, the cliffs rising dark and craggy overhead, draped thickly with ivy, the end of the street blocked with gigantic masses of fallen rock, and the sea at the very foot of some of the houses; with here and there a narrow strip of beach.