It is a wild scene, and wilder beyond the point, where the whole beach is strewn with broken lumps, and ledge succeeds to ledge, now high, now low, compelling you to many an up-and-down, stooping under a rude cornice, or scrambling over a slippery ridge. In places the cliff overhangs threateningly, or, receding, forms an alcove where you may sit and feast your eye with the wondrous commotion, and your ear with the thundering chorus of many waters.
The upper stratum of clay is worn by the twofold action of rain and spray into singularly fantastic forms, and where it has been deeply excavated, there, kept in by the rim of stone, lies a salt-water pool so bright and pellucid that the temptation to bathe therein is irresistible. I thought to get round to Gristhorp Bay, but came presently to a recess where the breakers rushing half way up the cliff barred all further progress. To lean against the rocky wall and feel it throb with the shock within the shower of spray, produced an almost painful emotion; and it seemed to me that the more tumultuous the sea the better did it harmonize with a promontory so rugged and grim.
I retraced my steps to a stair that zigzags up the cliff on the inner side of the point. Near this certain visitors have cut their initials in the hard rock floor, of such dimensions that you can only imagine a day must have been spent in the task with mallet and chisel. Vain records! The sea will wash them out some day. When on the summit I was struck more than before by the contrast between the rage and uproar on the outside of the ridge, and the comparative calm inside; nor was it easy to leave a view to which, apart from all the features of the shore, the restless sea added touches of the sublime, wherein wrought fascination. And all the while men, looking like pigmies in the distance, were groping for crabs along each side of the far-stretching reef.
A little way north of the point a rustic pavilion standing in a naked garden indicates where the visitor will find a jutting buttress whence to contemplate the scene below. More exposed on this side, the cliff is more cut up and broken in outline, jutting and receding in rugged ledges, and in every hollow rests one of those limpid pools, so calm and clear that you can see the creeping things moving between the patches of weed at the bottom. And the beach is thickly strewn with boulders of a size which perhaps represents the gravel of the "prochronic" era.