The extraordinary ‘dinosaur eggs’ of granite piled up on Porth Nanven beach in the far west of Cornwall are always a bit of a surprise, even when you’ve seen them before and know they are there.
How can so many rocks of very different sizes be such perfectly smooth rounded shapes? Of course, the answer is the sea but from thousands and thousands of years ago. It seems astonishing that water can make any impact on rock-hard (sorry!) granite but in time it wears away, bit by bit.
The sea is not the only water present at this beach at the end of the Cot Valley near St Just. It has a sparkling stream running beneath, between and over these eggs of stone and I found the patterns made by light and water on the speckled rock quite mesmerising.
I watched the flecks of dazzling white quartz and other minerals being stretched and squeezed by the ripples of water. The grains of gold and grey and white and black, specks of colour and light transformed into lines and stripes, then back to spots and dots.
It all happens so fast you can’t really make sense of what’s going on…until you freeze it with a photograph. Then the beauty of one tiny moment in a never-ending process is revealed. In this image the detail is stripped away leaving simplified forms creating an abstract almost monotone impression of the granite in the stream.
