Sand Castles
It must have had something to do with living
4 minutes walk from the sea as a child, in Lowestoft, where there wasn’t a lot
else to do. Apart from bike rides into the countryside, of course.
My brother and sisters, plus friends Nicholas
and Robert would go down the beach and “build a place” – what we called making
sand castles.
We still do this on the rare occasions that we meet up in
Lowestoft. The sand there is particularly good for constructing intricate “wet
moulded” sand buildings.
There is a technique that we developed : take an egg
sized blob of wet sand between the
fingers and thumb, place it where you want it, wait until enough of the water
has drained out so that it sets solid, and let go.
You pile up “bricks” made
like this, making them smaller as you go up, ending up by dribbling wet sand
through the finger tips to create a pointed top.
In those days the sea came up to the sea
wall at high tide, so at low tide people walking along the promenade could look
down onto the beach to where our “place” was developing. When the tide was
right we could get a whole day’s building in before the sea washed it all away.
We would cover a large area, maybe 20 or 30 feet square, each one of us
building in our own unique style.
Nicholas tended towards the gothic cathedral
look, with many small bricks and lots of buttresses. Robert always had a story
to go with his city plan, usually involving the populus escaping from floods
using a specially constructed walkway.
I sometimes went for mammoth, angular
arches, and sometimes the more organic blob style, but bigger bricks than
Nicholas.
We often got crowds standing to watch us
work.
Then, as the sun set, we would go home for
tea, and the sea would wash it all away. A lesson in life if ever there was
one! The fun is in the doing, not hanging on to the result…
As adults Robert, Nicholas and I try out
this building technique on beaches that we visit. Mostly we find that the sand
quality is not good.
Apparently, Goa is not bad. Los Angeles is very gritty.
The South and West coasts of France tend to have sand that is too course to be
usable, so I resort to building henges out of the rocks that are there.
Here is my interpretation of Mont St. Michel, France, seen in the background :
I’ll dig out some old photos of our “places”
and get them scanned ASAP…
Meanwhile, here is a minor construction on a
beach in Cornwall, August 2006, built by myself, Hannah and my brother-in-law Neil :
You can see the mostly “organic” brick
style, with a small arch to the right, and some henge-like stones appearing on
the left. The sand was rather too course compared to Lowestoft. A plus is the
pools of water which didn’t seem to depend on the tides…
Above is a small "place" that I made on the Greek Island of Andros, 4th May 2016.
Below is a video fly-past:
The video shows several building techniques:
The sand on Andros is very course, so the "place" has to be scaled down to heights that can support themselves."