The dyke of the Duchess Anne, and a series of posts.

La digue de la Duchesse Anne, Duchess Anne's dyke, was the first, mediaeval, attempt to hold back the sea from the coastal marshes around Mt St Michel. After that for several centuries more embankments and drains and such like were constructed, notably by the Dutch, but it wasn't until the 19th century that the cultivable and pasture land that makes up the Bay was finally secure.

La digue is now a well-surfaced motor-vehicle-free footpath and bridle- and cycle way, and it goes on and on from the Mont westward for a good 20 km, past saltmarsh and sands and sheltering settlements like Cherrueix in its lee. It's a very Dutch-looking landscape, of dykes and polders, lines of poplars, low-built farms, windmills even, and in fact the best way to explore it would be Dutch style, which is to say, by bicycle. Walking is fine; the air's a tonic, the space is wide and open and the views are great,




the thorn trees and grasses string out in the wind,

but you can walk and walk and very little changes except that the Mont grows a tiny bit bigger if you're walking towards it.

Which was what we were doing. But then I saw them: fence posts.

I think fence posts may be becoming something of a hobby with me (and they do say it's a fine line between hobby and mental illness). These were some of the most hypnotising I've ever seen.

Made of chestnut, I should think, heavy-grained, substantial and imposing, so that the the weathering and silvering of the salt winds and spray made them into the most dramatic of sculptures,

like fetishes or totems,

infibulated with wire,

chained and bound

some dignified, but some also sinister, bonelike,

their knots and graining, sometime elegant and abstract, or forming a refuge for living creatures

looked like mouths, tongues, sockets, or other openings and appendages,

and the eroded holes bored for the wire like eyes, animated by the living green of the world behind.

Their regular intervals and repetitious patterning increase the typological quality of the posts, and the compulsion to stop and study each one, its similarities and differences. I become more and more convinced they are trying to tell me something. Something not altogether happy or benign.

Unfortunately, not everyone could share my fascination,

or wait around for it. I find myself running between posts to keep up.