along the dunes
Belhaven, 14 August
I’ve been struggling to write here for the last few weeks. It’s felt strange to be sharing these calm scenes when so many parts of the world are on fire. Wildfires in Canada, in France, Spain, Portugal, Crete, Greece. Closer to home in the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland, a fire that could take weeks if not months to fully extinguish, and down south, with the devastation at the RSPB Minsmere site at Dunwich Heath in Suffolk. At Stourbridge in the West Midlands where a wildfire spread to people’s homes. Wildfires across Wales.
After weeks of worrying about the rising temperatures, the heat dome across Europe and the spread of drought conditions, now there is fire, and every time I turn on the news or scroll Instagram, fire is waiting. There’s a viral quote that sums it up: ‘Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.’
I feel that the fire in the Cairngorms brought that quote home. How do you turn up online, whether on a blog or Instagram (or wherever you share and connect) and keep things ‘business as usual’ when the world is anything but. I don’t know the answer to this. And I’m finding it harder to ‘keep things light’ while also worrying. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re all walking quietly towards a calamitous future while, in my case, sharing calm walks and sunsets.
On the flipside, I understand the importance of sharing that calm. Of sharing these simple moments outdoors. My brain needs this to reset, and if you’ve landed here then you probably feel the same. But I’m also wondering about how I can educate myself on these issues in order to write about them with knowledge. A course caught my eye on The Open University. It’s called Environment: journeys through a changing world, and it’s got me wondering about my ability to study (I’m not academic – I think visually) and about how ready my brain is to absorb information now. Several years ago, I wouldn’t have been as conscious of this, but brain fog is now a daily partner, and that reality has changed my confidence and my perception of what I’m able to do. If you’re reading this and you’ve studied in adulthood (later in adulthood), how did you find it? Did it re-engage your brain? Did it recharge you?
I often find myself sharing walks here weeks or even months after those walks, but this set of photos breaks that habit. This walk at Belhaven is from last Friday, when we headed down the coast late – late enough to avoid people – and walked along the beach before crossing back over the dunes towards Hedderwick Sands and the salt marsh. It feels obvious to say that the days are creeping, but they really are now. After a summer of very late walks, getting back to the car by 10pm to drive home, it’s now dark well before 10 – today’s sunset at Belhaven is at 8.42pm – but our body clocks haven’t quite adjusted to getting out an hour earlier in the evenings. We’re still in that habit of starting an evening walk at half 8, only now there’s very little light left.
Still, this walk was beautiful. As we walked up over the dunes, the distant sky was washed in the glow of the setting sun. I took more videos than photos during the first half of the walk, grabbing the available light when I could, and then swapped to photos as we headed back along the edge of the salt marsh, with this moody sky as we looked towards the woodland at John Muir Country Park. This was stunning – the quiet, the stillness, with no one around.
This is what we’ll miss over winter: evenings that hold this quietness, walks below big skies, places that enable you to breathe a little more deeply. Friday nights like this. These walks don’t shift the environmental worries, the fear of a changing climate that’s accelerating in that change, but these moments create some space just to be. You don’t fully appreciate the urgency around our changing climate when at home watching the news: you appreciate it when you’re outside, within our natural world that now feels more at risk than ever.
Belhaven, East Lothian, 14 August 2026
