New Trails

If you are new to Salt Trails, welcome and we look forward to sharing walks, conversations and experiences. If you have joined us before we look forward to walking with you again soon.
It's been a whole year since the last posting - we must have been very busy! Lots of walking and conversations have taken place, they haven't been recorded here probably because they are still in progress. We are still keen to share and find out how the wind affects people and places.

We will be at COAST doing more Wind Mapping activities October 15th - 30th as part of Cromer and Sheringham Arts Festival  

October 15th new Wind Diaries will be placed at the Beach shelter, West Runton
and Cliff Top Cafe Overstrand. Share your pictures, stories and comments about the weather during the month.

October 22nd a Kite Making workshop will take place at Overstrand Parish Hall with kite flying at 12 noon and 4p.m. 
October 29th Wind walks will take place from Overstrand and West Runton. We will exchange the wind diaries at Cromer and meet for a picnic lunch. Leaving at 11a.m. this will be about a 5 mile walk, sharing stories and experiences about the wind along the coast path. The return journey can be made on the Coast Hopper bus

To let us know how many people are coming go to the online booking form

West Runton Wind Diary

What was it like at West Runton today? How was the wind? Fierce? Gentle? How did it move the waves, the grasses, the sand? Did it whisper or did it roar? How did it feel on your cheeks? Did your hat blow away? Did the sand blow into your sandwiches and make them gritty?

We would like to know the answers to all of these questions! You can add pictures and writing to the diary at West Runton Shelter, and you can add photographs and stories to this blog.

This Wind Project will run from September 25th to October 17th. You can drop in at any time and participate, and there will also be three organised events:

Sunday 3rd October: Wind Art Day

Be inspired by the wind! We will be making pennant flags to fly in the wind at West Runton Shelter incorporating your stories, drawings and paintings. 11am – 3pm

Sunday 10th October: Walking conversation

To coincide with 10:10, the international campaign to cut carbon emissions, we invite you to take part in a walking conversation about wind energy, its destructive force and its creative potential. 11am – 3pm approx.

The website about 10:10 is here, we will link to the international events on the day http://www.350.org/

Sunday 17th October: Wind Mapping Day

Come and make a giant pattern on the beach at West Runton showing the changes in wind direction over the past month at West Runton. 11am – 3pm

For more about the Cromer-Sheringham festival see http://www.casaf.co.uk/

Salt Trails 2010

Welcome back after a long break from the Salt Trails blog to a new season of walks and conversations.

Linked to the exhibition 'Abrasion' at King of Hearts, Norwich we are offering two walking conversations at Happisburgh North Norfolk on 19th and 20th June.

Why is conversation so different when you are on a walk with someone?
What changes when you talk about a place that you are actually experiencing with all of your senses?
What happens if you broaden your idea of conversation to include the conversation with the landscape as well as conversation about the landscape?
Come and find out.

For more information and the booking form click here
Please let others know, we are really looking forward to this season of walks and conversations.

Tall Timothy said:

Salt House

A bee-wolf eats wasps
Honeysuckle grows bold
The sea is breathing sand

A paper world is plundered
Woodbine twines to heaven
Sand is breathing water

A mansion is destroyed
A river of flowers is trumpeted
Wave and stone are one

Conversely

Salt irritates, heals, preserves, and centuries ago was a currency of reward.

We marked our trails of crystallised perceptions; some of them preserved, some rolled into the surf or lifted away in the wind; being our reward, or perhaps our irritation.

While Hamish Fulton and Richard Long made an artistic practice of walking solo, we found our work as a little group, feeling the place through our stride-rhythms, jazz-improvising stitch-lines and figures of speech to hold together the seams between sand and waves, land and sky, nevermore and always.

Imagining risen seas - a future whirlpool, made by spiral walking. Dave Pritchard, 12 July.

the paths people take

This reminds me that things also have their own paths - if, for example you join razor shells, end to end, the line begins to curve, and I have been thinking about reeds, the paths they would travel if you joined them end to end...

Like razor shells, they seem at first glance to be straight, but they are not. We might think that we walk in fairly straight lines, but we don't.....

Drawing threads together

Play can be serious fun, at different times walks were funny and challenging.

The people, land, shoreline and sea have been filled with stories and I find myself weaving a Salt Trails cloth.
Drawing together walkers, places, flotsam and jetsam, images and threads of conversations.

There are long strands, a warp, of the route we took.
There are the shorter, weft like threads, which make the crossings and relationships found on walks.
There are even more fragile ones, almost invisible, which may be the silences or clouds passing over.
Potential for a treble, or even quadruple layered cloth comes to mind, where there are some threads that appear occasionally. They are the stitching cloth, holding layers together, not always in an obvious pattern.
The crossings like those of Indra's net, reflecting all the new ways of hearing, seeing and perceiving. They are reminders of walks taken and people known, or conversations and journeys that will be taken in future.