This morning we awoke wanting to wash away the slough of hibernation so we head towards the western valley. We follow the road down instead of the cliff path today, hoping to see the stirrings of spring on the riverbanks. The road is lined with juvenile elm that stand at the base of steep bracken covered slopes, their trunks glistening in the spray of the black river. Little hands reach tentatively into holes between the winter lace of ivy wrapping the granite walls. The dank, sweet scent of decaying leaves creep up to meet us alongside the gleaming camelia. The sea is hidden from view until you are more than halfway down. You breathe it in before you see it. Heavy scents evaporate as the sharp white freshness, drenched with salt, sweeps up from the v-shaped glimpse of sea, slate grey on this January day, and restless.

It is not an easy beach to master and you have to understand the tides. Time it wrong and the land ends abruptly above a churning shallow cove. But get there just before the low tide turns and there is a beach of Jurassic dreams. We pick our way between impossibly round boulders sliding on green algae, leaping over the river that splashes its way between the dark crevices between rock and sand. We are in the season of storms, and the howling winds of the night before have stripped the sand back leaving these huge bleached round bones.

We hoist ourselves up onto a ledge of rock, pitted with tiny pools, that curves around one side of the cove. The pools are black and rimmed with limpets and ruby-coloured anemones. We peer into them, looking for stranded mermaids or crabs. Nothing today. So we turn towards the sea. It is a deep green now, and choppy but there is a small lagoon hidden just over the rocks. It is not entirely cut off but rocks offer shelter from the winds which scud inland. We get undressed quickly, and tiptoe across the barnacles down to the water’s edge. Bare skin burns in the air but the water is more gentle. It is certainly warmer than it has been despite the fact that today it is snowing seemingly everywhere else but here.

Later, wrapped in towels and rubbing orange and blue skin back to life, we watch the gannets gather in a cloud of white. When they hunt like this it means there are larger predators about. Dolphins perhaps. Perhaps they heard us through the water our clumsy splashing echoing into the deep water beyond the lagoon. The birds arc up into the blue sky from a white mist of bodies, pausing for a moment, balanced on air, before plunging down. Spumes of white water erupt one after the other like an endless parade of roman candles. A winter firework display from the green sea just for us.