Sarah-Jane Dobner remembers a trip to a southern gem: Portland.
An island of flint-in-mud geology, quarries and fossils. A place for dinosaurs, dragons, snakes, lizards - an ancient, reptile zoology. An oddity poking out the south of the Kingdom - straining for a fight or just offering a viewpoint?
Dragon
It took me years to love Portland
Found it cold as a dragon's back
Felt betrayed by the gaps between bolts
Spat off. Didn't get it. Couldn't love
Its dusty roundedness, didn't trust
Those flints poking out like dragon's teeth
It seemed made of the wrong stuff
For a cliff. A dragon's head of air and fire
Stuck on the body of jurassic coast
Took two decades, a blink in time
For me to begin to understand
Its broken layers, to love the soft
Pinches and hard truths
Many routes were re-equipped. That helped
Plus I became more of a dragon myself
Dorset Wildlife Trust Visitor Centre Car Park
Habitually, we meet in the car park of the Visitor Centre
Mid-way along the causeway, turn right
As windsurfers and kitesurfers in Portland Harbour
Outstrip the vehicles. Skirt the buildings
Park nose-on to the vast bank of golden-grey pebbles
Use the facilities, update weather, fill a thermos
Check guidebooks, cross-reference projects
Then set off for Wallsend or the Cuttings or Battleship
There are threats, on posts, about parking tickets
We never pay. Barely stop. Flit in and away. But
Regretfully - like most climbers I suspect - are yet to make
The obvious hike, over the bank, to Chesil Beach
Flipping the Bird
Sticking out of the coast
Defiant middle finger
An appropriate place for prisoners
And young offenders
Every churchman and royal has coveted
Portland stone for its cachet and toughness
Over the years
They have tried
To hammer that peg
Level with the rest
Twenty quarries from Chesil to Bill
Such blasting! Such intimidation!
Yet to this day
The broken landmass flips the bird
Messes with shipping
And causes a scare
With its races
As I slept
The sea and stone seemed in cahoots
Still troublemaking
Snakeskin (Reptile Smile, Blacknor North)
A Top Fifty
Sought-after, polished and
Slippery. What on earth was I thinking?
(Onsighted Reptile Smile when I was young, gripped, too
Scared to commit, too frightened to fall. Clawed
My way up, all nails and panic)
It's usually a mistake
To return to scenes of shame. Or indeed
To scenes of glory. Yet here I am (a gown of quickdraws
And my years of climbing) at this snakeskin
Collector's item, high fashion
Catwalk of a line
Slither up the flowstone
(Palming, bridging, drop-knee, hip-swings)
Beaming! Wiliness and age better-suited to this trickery
Than being strong and keen. Sashay to the chains
Tracked by the spotlight of the sun
The eyes of the sea
Whittling
The promontory juts out: a partly whittled item
Abandoned on the south coast
Just left. Half finished
What happened? did the rock get too hard?
The knife blunt? the dinner bell ring?
And what was the carver creating -
A spoon? a spatula? or something larger
The figurehead of a boat seems most likely
As the rough projection breasts
The beat and turn of the English Channel
Then humans joined in. Hacking away
But not in agreement as to what they were making
The Beast
An island but not an island
Rural but industrial
Sport climbing but coastal
It's disconcerting, Portland
Once you've driven down the causeway
The rules change. Hard
To put a finger on it. As if
You're being monitored. Or the rug
Might be pulled away
Even if it's just
Entirely unrelated climatic conditions
Between the east and west sides
Making it seem like two different seasons
Or worn paths on the cliff edge leading to precipices
Sections of crag
Still with bolts in
Cast on the ground. In a psychological horror
These would be signs
Gunslingers
Part I: Coppola
Dinner at the chippy on Weston Road
Codfathers. Mafia allusions, gangster, tongue-in-cheek
Nod to Francis Ford Coppola
But fish and chips, night after night?
Monday evening. Every pub kitchen shut. No restaurants
Drive through the prefabs and estates, looking for food
And fail. Boil up some pasta and grate on cheddar
Sleep in the van, barely satisfied
Next morning in the lay-by, jot verbatim
The words of a young man to his climbing companion
Can you be fucked with more of these giant ciabattas?
As they pack their rucksacks for Cheyne Weares
A new, potty-mouthed mob. Only a question of time, surely
Before Portland gentrifies. It's coastal, beautiful
Well-connected with a magnificent climate
But it's an island, with its own code, and doesn't need outsiders
Part II: Morricone
Not as bad as it used to be
When you worried for your car windows each time
You set off for Blacknor North
In a gold rush for stone
A Morricone wind as we stride the clifftop path
Gunslingers, with our biceps and dyneema
Walking in the footsteps of the quarrymen
Bagging routes and bragging
Four villages: Weston, Easton, Southwell
Basic geography. Yet at the cusp lies Fortuneswell
Sandbag or golden nugget?
How is your relationship with Lady Luck?
Glacé cherry
We used to play a game as young teenagers
A pudding basin of flour, inverted, glacé cherry on top
Take turns to pare a slice of white powder onto the plate
The facets angled and cracked like rock
Obviously, as and when the cherry fell
You had to pick it up with your mouth. Grainy photos
Of each of us, white-faced, flour in our
Hair, eyelashes, nostrils, collars, sleeves, teeth
Portland has this quality. Landslips cutting slivers
From the cliffs leaving pillars, towers, drapes of limestone
Ready to collapse. It's your go
Hold steady. Don't dislodge the cherry
Ammonite
A national treasure
On the way to the Cuttings
Giant ammonites in the rock
I'm so British
Feel like we shouldn't be allowed
Half expect the crag
To be cordoned off
Behind tasselled ropes
A stately home
With signs not to touch
And yet here we are
Stroking the ribbed whorls of snails
From a hundred and forty-five
Million years ago. Softly
As if they can still feel us. Surreptitiously
Before we get told off
Lizard
Splayed on the west-facing wall, the climber
Resembles a brightly-coloured lizard
Advancing patiently up the rock. Catching a fly
There are dinosaur footprints all over the island, left in the mud
Who knows which one of our casual movements
Will outlive us?
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Comments
I like your work, Dob cubed
Never been to Portland
You've given me a feeling of what it might be like to go
Even if I never do
There are threats, on posts, about parking tickets We never pay. Barely stop. Flit in and away.
Is UKC really condoning such behaviour?
It’s a poem. Not an editorial or part of the crag approach notes in the app.
It's clearly hit a nerve for quite a lot of forum regulars given the growing number of dislikes. I know where I sit on the subject of artistic endeavour vs mean button pressers.
There once was negative feature
That fed many a miserable creature
They stress and they press
And they fess and depress
A poet, the nerve! That'll teach 'er
Oh why do we keep this damn button
To the lamb of discourse, less than mutton
We don't have to like
But it's hardly a fike
To expect and respect art/exposition.
I
I hear what you're saying. But the problem with these poems is that, well, they're just not very good. It's hard to dress them up as anything else. I can appreciate good writing and poetry. There are some brilliant articles on this site. It's a shame and somewhat baffling that these particular poems still get published on here.