• A green field with a hedge in the left background. The field is covered with thin, eerie mist.
Photograph of the Breton coast, showing sky with sunlight through clouds on a grey sea with distant mountains on the horizon

Kenneth White on the Breton Coast (The Fundamental Field)

William Sharp evokes ‘those wild Breton coasts of the Tréguier headland’ with the ‘grey, muttering waste’ of the sea. Little did I realise, when I must have read these phrases at the age of 14 on a cliff overlooking the north end of the village of Fairlie, in Ayrshire, Scotland that years later I would be living in that self-same area.