Storms, Sunsets and Sore Knees: My August Along the Heritage Coast

I've been meaning to start something like this for years. A proper record of what I've actually been doing with the camera each month, rather than just a scattering of photos on Facebook that vanish into the timeline within a day. So here it is. The first one. August, and the Heritage Coast, which is where I seem to end up more often than anywhere else.

There's a reason for that. Twenty-five years behind a camera and I still haven't found anywhere that changes its mind about itself quite as fast as this stretch of coastline does. You can leave the house in bright sun and come home in a squall. You can plan a shot for weeks and have the weather rewrite the whole thing in the time it takes to walk from the car park to the cliff edge. Most photographers would call that frustrating. I call it job security.

I've walked most of this coast so many times now that I could probably do it with my eyes shut, though I wouldn't recommend it given some of the drops involved. What keeps bringing me back isn't the familiarity though. It's the opposite of that. Every single walk, no matter how many times I've done it before, throws up something I haven't seen. A different light. A different tide. A different mood entirely. So this month I made more of an effort than usual to actually take note of what I was seeing, rather than just filing it away as another lovely evening and forgetting the details by the time I got the boots off.

What follows is eight of those walks, or bits of them, told roughly in the order I took them rather than any tidier narrative. There's no clean story here, just a month of turning up with a camera and seeing what the coast decided to give me.

Nash Point lighthouse, the only thing in this photo that hadn't heard the storm was coming.

Nash Point in a Temper

I'll start where most of my walks start, which is Nash Point. There's something about that lighthouse that pulls me back, month after month, year after year. It's not subtle. It stands there, blazing white, entirely unbothered, while everything around it does whatever it likes.

On this particular day, everything around it had decided to sulk. The sky had gone that deep, bruised grey that tells you exactly what's coming and gives you about ten minutes to decide whether you care. I did not care. I stood there while the light dropped and the cloud rolled in low over the cottages, and I got the shot I'd been chasing for months without really knowing I was chasing it.

That's the thing nobody tells you about coastal photography when you're starting out. You don't plan the best shots. You just turn up often enough that eventually the weather does something worth photographing while you happen to be standing there with a camera in your hand. Everything else is patience, and a willingness to get rained on.

I've photographed that lighthouse more times than I could honestly count, and I still don't think I've got tired of it once. There's something reassuring about a building that's spent well over a century doing exactly one job, in exactly one spot, regardless of what the sky throws at it. Whatever mood I turn up in, it's always in a better one. I find that useful most days.

Silk water, stubborn rocks.

A Different Day Entirely

A week or so later I was back, and it was a different world. Proper blue sky. The kind of clouds that look like they've been drawn on by someone with a very light touch and a lot of confidence. I set up for a long exposure on the rocks near the water, the ones absolutely armoured in barnacles, and stood there for what felt like an age while the shutter did its slow, silent work.

Long exposures test you. You can't rush them and you can't half do them. You commit to standing in one spot, often with your feet slowly sinking into wet sand, while the world carries on without you. The sea smooths itself out into something almost silk-like. Everything that moves disappears, and everything that stays still gets sharper and more stubborn looking by comparison. Those rocks looked like they'd been arguing with the tide for a thousand years and were still winning.

It's a strange kind of stillness, being out there on your own with just the sound of the waves and the quiet click of the shutter every few minutes. I'm not a naturally patient man. Ask anyone who's worked with me over the years. But the coast has taught me more about waiting than any job ever did, and I've had a fair few of those.

I remember, years back, thinking long exposures were a bit of a gimmick. A trick you learned once and then used far too often because it looked impressive. I don't think that anymore. Used properly, on the right subject, it doesn't just smooth the water out for effect. It changes the whole feel of the place. Rocks that would look ordinary in a snapshot suddenly look like they've been there since before anyone was around to name them.

The sky put on the full show. The cliff just stood there in silhouette, unbothered as ever.

The One That Made It All Worth It

Then there was the evening that made the whole month worthwhile. I'd gone back up to the at Nash Point cliffs with no real plan, just a feeling that something was going to happen with the sky, and for once I was right. The sun dropped and the whole horizon caught fire, all orange and pink and that deep, bruised purple you only get a handful of times a year if you're lucky and paying attention.

The cliff itself went almost entirely black against it, just a hard, textured silhouette holding its ground while the sky did all the shouting. I stood there for a long time after I'd taken the shot. Didn't need to. The light had already changed by then and there wasn't much more to capture. But you don't walk away from a sunset like that in a hurry. You just watch it, because you know it's not coming back, not like that, not ever again.

That's the part of this job, or hobby, or whatever we're calling it these days, that never gets old. Every sunset is a one off. Every single one. Turn up a day later and it'll be something else entirely, or nothing at all, just grey cloud and a headache.

Dunraven's cliffs trailing off into the distance,

The Long Beach Towards Monknash

I climbed down from Dunraven, and the thing that hit me straight away once I reached the bottomed over the rocks the beach opens right out below the cliffs, and after a climb down like that, with your eyes fixed mostly on where to put your feet, it comes as a bit of a shock how much sky suddenly appears once you're standing on the sand looking up.

That day it fancied wispy, streaky cloud, dragged right across the blue like something had scratched it. There were gulls further down the beach having some sort of meeting, the way gulls do, and one lone figure paddling in the surf a good way out. I never did find out if that was a very confident dog walker or someone who'd badly misjudged the tide.

There's a particular kind of quiet that hits you once you're down off that path. Not silence, because the sea's never actually silent, but a sort of openness that makes you breathe differently. I notice it every time. You come off that climb a bit out of breath and hunched against the wind, and somewhere in the first hundred yards along the sand your shoulders drop and you stop thinking about your knees, or the walk back up, or whatever was bothering you before you left the house.

Somewhere under all that sky, a beach heading to Monknash.

I found myself walking the length of that huge beach, heading along towards Monknash, and the thing that hit me straight away was the sheer size of the sky above it. This stretch does that to you. The beach opens right out, and the cliffs at the far end sit small and low on the horizon, while the sky just keeps going and going overhead, doing whatever it fancies.

That day it fancied wispy, streaky cloud, dragged right across the blue like something had scratched it. There were gulls further down the beach having some sort of meeting, the way gulls do, and one lone figure paddling in the surf a good way out. I never did find out if that was a very confident dog walker or someone who'd badly misjudged the tide.

There's a particular kind of quiet to a walk like that. Not silence, because the sea's never actually silent, but a sort of openness that makes you breathe differently. I notice it every time.

Long exposure near Nash Point, the rocks holding their ground while the sea blurs past.

One I Nearly Walked Past

This next one very nearly didn't happen. I was walking from Nash Point, not really looking for anything in particular, just putting one boot in front of the other, when I spotted this little outcrop of rock sitting stubbornly in the shallows. Everything else in the frame had gone soft and milky with the long exposure, the whole sea reduced to a kind of rolling mist, but that rock refused to blur. It just sat there, sharp and solid, doing its own thing while the water rushed past it in slow motion.

There's a marker buoy out on the horizon in that shot too, tiny and easy to miss, but it gives the whole thing a sense of scale that I don't think I'd have got any other way. Sometimes the best photographs aren't the ones you go out looking for. They're the ones that catch your eye for half a second while you're thinking about something else entirely, usually your knees, and you're just glad you had the camera out rather than packed away in the bag.

St Donats castle in the woods

St Donats, Hiding in the Trees

Later in the month I found myself walking past St Donats, and the castle did what it always does, which is barely show itself at all. You get the odd turret poking up above the treeline, a hint of grey stone among all that green, and then it's gone again behind another cluster of branches. It's a proper "didn't know that was there" sort of moment if you're not from round here, and even after thirty eight years of living in this area, it still catches me slightly off guard every time.

The sky was doing its own thing that day too, one great tower of cloud building up on one side like it meant business, while the rest of the sky carried on much more calmly, almost as if half the clouds had turned up for the shift and the other half hadn't quite bothered. The field in front of it all had gone that dry, golden colour that fields get in August round here, the kind that looks soft from a distance and feels like coarse rope up close.

I like photographs that make you look twice. This is one of them. You could walk straight past that gap in the trees and never know the castle was there at all.

St Donats beach to Llantwit Major

The Last Stretch to Llantwit

And then, to close the month out, the walk from St Donats beach round towards Llantwit Major, which is about as close to home ground as I get. Big dark cloud looming overhead like it was building up to give the whole Vale a stern talking to, with just a bit of blue sky sneaking in from the side, pretending everything was fine.

The rocks step down into the water in these long, flat shelves, like some sort of staircase built for someone enormous and not remotely bothered about health and safety. The sea itself had gone a pale, almost tropical turquoise, which always throws people who aren't used to this coast. It looks warm. It is not warm. I could have told you that from the beach and saved everyone the disappointment, but there's no arguing with how good it looks in a photograph.

Llantwit Major sat soft and hazy in the distance, waiting its turn, and by the time I got back to the car the light had already started to change again. That's the rhythm of this coast in a nutshell. Nothing stays the same for more than about twenty minutes, and if you want to catch it, you simply have to keep turning up.

Looking Back on the Month

Eight photographs, five or six different walks, and I don't think I saw the same sky twice. That's the honest truth of shooting this stretch of coast. You don't get consistency and you shouldn't expect it. What you get instead is variety, and if you're patient enough, and daft enough to keep climbing down cliffs at my age, you get moments that make the whole business worthwhile.

I'm genuinely looking forward to doing this again next month, if only to find out what the weather's got planned next. Knowing this coastline, it'll be something I haven't photographed yet, on a day I hadn't planned to go out, and I'll come home with wet boots and a memory card full of exactly what I needed.

Twenty-five years I've been doing this, one way or another, and I'd have thought by now the novelty would have worn off. It hasn't. If anything it's the opposite. The more of this coast I photograph, the more I realise I've barely scratched the surface of it, and there's something quite comforting about that at my age. A reason to keep lacing the boots up. A reason to keep climbing back up cliffs I've no real business climbing.

Thanks for reading . There'll be more.

Dave