Reportage

The salt road

Seven days along a coast where the sea is still farmed by hand, from the salt pans of Marrow Bay to the last house on Kell Head.

Words and photographs by Ines ArlowTwelve minute read

The rakers at Marrow Bay start before five. By then the crust on the pans has hardened in the night air, and it breaks clean under the wooden blade with a sound like stepping on frost. Arthur Penhale has worked these flats for thirty-one years, and his father before him; he still checks the brine with the back of his hand, the way you would check a bath for a child.

The road south from the bay is not really a road. It is a chain of footpaths, causeways and farm tracks that used to carry salt to the market towns inland, and most of it now carries nobody at all. I walked it over seven days in late September, with one camera, two lenses and a notebook that got wetter every afternoon.

What follows is the coast as it came, one stop at a time.

Tidewater Reportage The salt road, in seven pictures

Portfolio

Seven days, one coast

From Marrow Bay to Kell Head, on foot. Keep scrolling and walk it with her.

Marrow Bay Salt pans at first light. The rakers start before five, while the crust is still cold. Ines Arlow for Tidewater

Gull Rock The light on the point, in a fog that sits there until noon. Ines Arlow for Tidewater

Sennick harbour The last boats in before the tide turns. Ines Arlow for Tidewater

Lower Fennick Lunch at the Prowse farm: bread, lemons and a jug that has never left the table. Ines Arlow for Tidewater

The Teeth From the cliff path, a crabber heading for open water. Ines Arlow for Tidewater

Port Elvan Lanes too narrow for anything but feet and washing lines. Ines Arlow for Tidewater

Kell Head After sunset. One house, one lamp, and nothing west of it but the sea. Ines Arlow for Tidewater

Marrow Bay

Kell Head

At Kell Head the path simply stops. There is a stile, a field of sheep that do not look up, and a single house whose owner, Maud Treloar, has kept a lamp in the west window every night since her husband went out with the pilchard boats in 1974 and came back late. She knows it is not needed any more. She lights it anyway.

The coast does not end. It just runs out of people to tell you where you are.

Over the week I met eleven people still making a living from this water: three rakers, two crabbers, a lighthouse keeper with nothing left to keep, a baker and four members of one family who have turned a sardine cellar into a smokehouse. None of them would call it a dying trade. Most of them said, in one way or another, that it was simply a slow one.

On the last morning the fog came in again over Gull Rock, and the salt road behind me disappeared into it one headland at a time. It seemed the right way to leave.