The Sea Inside

set apart. Their eyes give little away, saying nothing of whatever lies behind them. Maybe they’re ready to lure me over the cliff so that they can feast on my bones below. Or perhaps they’re taunting me for my ineptitude as they fly, banking and swooping and spinning and tumbling in the air, the sunlight shining through their primary feathers, turning them diaphanous and ghostly grey. They’re joined by groups of rooks and jackdaws, summoned to a corvid convention. That summer I’ll see their aeronautics mirrored by the distant loops of an air show. Perhaps we’d pay more attention to birds if they left contrails of their own.
    As I watch, a new player makes its entrance: a peregrine falcon, riding on the updraught, streamlined and straight-winged – such a noble, Spitfire of a bird, so supercharged one might imagine it had a Rolls-Royce engine, even as its name evokes a chivalric past. In his book
The Peregrine
, a study in a reign of terror, J.A. Baker describes how these raptors ‘perfect their killing power by endless practice, like knights or sportsmen’ – a medieval analogy underlined by the name for a male falcon, a tiercel. Like the Farnes, ‘peregrine’ signifies pilgrim or traveller, since in the ancient art of hawking, newly-fledged birds were taken not from the nest, but while in flight from it. Its Latin name reflects this, as well as its sublime shape:
Falco peregrinus
, sickle-winged wanderer. Murderous and exquisite, it circles seemingly without effort, belying its facility as the fastest animal alive, able to fly at more than one hundred miles an hour, pursuing its prey with such velocity that a gull or jackdaw’s head can be snapped off in the violence of its attack.
    Baker – a librarian who lived in Essex in such obscurity that until recently no one knew the date of his death – followed the peregrine for ten years, a witness to its fenland fiefdom. He saw it living in a ‘pouring-away world’, negotiating the landscape in ‘a succession of remembered symmetries’. During the writing of his book, published in 1967, Baker was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Yet his peregrine is no symbol of the uncanny; it is utterly of its world. It is a survivor, still recovering from the wartime culls when it was shot as a threat to carrier pigeons employed as radio silence was imposed on submarine-spotting planes, and from the second assault of pesticidal poisoning in the sixties, which nearly silenced it for good. Peregrines have nested on this island cliff for centuries, raising successive dynasties in eyries set into its vertical face. It is a place made for such a soaring performer, infinitesimally attuned to movement and space; ‘the mastery of the thing!’, as Hopkins wrote of another raptor. As the unholy pilgrim scans for prey, using eyes that are bigger than a human being’s and five times more powerful, I might as well be watching a cheetah on an African plain as sitting on a cliff in southern England. To be alone with all this beauty seems somehow greedy.
    This terrain may be managed by man, but it has been edited by the wind, funnelling up the Channel, clipping the gorse and biting it into bonsai hillocks. The bushes still give off their coconut scent, as if to lure Julia’s husband from his palmy beaches. I’m almost bouncing along the springy turf, aware that any of it might collapse with my next step. Armpits and hollows, crevices and groins shifting like a restive sleeper under a downy duvet, all coursing through the ground, their cracks filled with lush plants that wouldn’t survive out in the open. Close to the edge, the chalk has begun to break off in lumps like damp icing sugar. A slow-motion earthquake is sundering the island from itself. The whole thing is sagging and groaning under the weight of its natural history, ready to slip silently and solemnly away.
    It all seems so gentle, this place, raised so far in the air. Heading west into the sun, I feel I could go on forever. Abruptly, the rolling green gives way to an astonishing view, as though it had been thrown in my face: great chopped-up chunks of white rock launched out into the water, waves washing around their weedy feet.
    I’ve seen the Needles ever since I can remember, but close to and yet still at a distance, they appear more strange than familiar, possibly because they’re always changing. The three eroded stumps, like rotten molars, are the remains of the long-lost arches and towers that