Blaxland Juliet - The Easternmost House

I live in a house on a windblown clifftop at the easternmost edge of what used to be the easternmost parish of England. The church fell into the sea in 1666, and this house itself called The Easternmost House has possibly only three summers left before it too is lost to coastal erosion. I wanted to describe a year of life on this crumbling cliff at the easternmost edge of England, in all seasons and in all weathers. This year of life is in fact the distillation of several years of life. There are stories, and beginnings, middles and ends, but not necessarily in that order.

We live here all year round, and have done so for several years, but I cannot say how many, for fear that to do so might itself tempt fate to render our life here episodic or experimental, and to end it with the destruction of the cliff and our house in a sudden storm.

Two nature-writing classics in particular are the ancestors of this book. The first is The Outermost House , by Henry Beston, first published in 1928, which takes as its subject a year of life on the great beach at Cape Cod. The second is Ring of Bright Water , by Gavin Maxwell, first published in 1959, which is about much more than the otters for which it will always be remembered. In each of these two books, the actual lives lived were the main adventure, and the writing was the offspring of the life. In each, there is also a deliberate attempt to live away from the mass of humanity, and to relate more closely to the natural world. Both also share an unspoken renunciation of the values of an urbanised society, and of materialism for its own sake. I suspect that Henry Bestons lament that the world is sick for lack of elemental things must be even truer today than it was in 1928. Gavin Maxwells assertion that places such as Camusfearna in Scotland are symbols of freedom from the prison of over-dense communities and the incarceration of office walls and hours echoes Bestons discomfort, but thirty years later. To their perceived horrors of the modern world as it was then, we can add a panoply of new ones: overpopulation, social media, plastic, pylons, sprawl.

Xanadu, Shangri-La, Tir na nOg, Avalon, Camusfearna, Arcadia. These names are all evocations of an archetype of an idyll, an earthly paradise set in a landscape of natural beauty, sometimes a place of myth or mystery. A suitable dwelling for such a scene might be a temple folly set in acres of rolling parkland, a timber cabin in a forest, a whitewashed cottage in a rugged landscape of rock and sea. But these places exist primarily in the imagination, so they can be changed, adjusted and revisited at will.

The Easternmost House is our real-life version, and throughout this book I will try to make this place as real to you as it is to us, and to convey some of the natural wonders surrounding us in this magical landscape of light and sky and water.

Look to this day!

For it is life, the very life of life.

Look well, therefore, to this day!

Such is the salutation of the dawn.

Ancient Sanskrit Poem