gulls

Gulls are among the most persistent nonhuman presences in Ray and Moth’s journey along the coast. They call above cliff-edge camps, gather over sheltered water, claim beaches when people leave, and seize food from walkers who underestimate them. The birds are not merely scenery: their routines register the changing hours and conditions of the shore, while their ease in finding a place to rest or feed throws the travellers’ search for safety into relief.

Presence Along the Path

At an exposed camp, the day begins with the sound of gulls coming and going above the cliff. The circumstances are precarious: Ray and Moth have pitched their tent in darkness and fog, only two metres from the edge, with a hundred-metre drop beyond the narrow strip of path and grass. When Ray stands, the gulls are already audible in the early morning. Their ordinary passage overhead forms part of a landscape in which even basic routines are complicated by exposure and by the absence of a private place to go.

Elsewhere, the birds register the bodily intensity of walking rather than danger. After a punishing climb on a rock path, with heat reflecting from the ground and the coast of Wales seemingly distant, Ray imagines the wind lifting beneath the rucksack and feels able to fly with the gulls. The image belongs to a moment of exhilaration: legs, hips and shoulders are aching, yet height and salt air briefly turn exertion into a sense of release. Moth, by contrast, walks leaning away from the sea and towards the cliff. The birds thus accompany a difference in how the two travellers inhabit the same exposed terrain, without resolving the risks it presents.

Evening Refuge and the Shared Shore

One evening, as England’s Ashes match ends in a draw, Ray and Moth lie in the grass beside their tent and watch gulls flying in flocks. With the light nearly gone, the calls change. Instead of the loud, raucous chatter associated with daytime, the birds make longer, quieter sounds. Their movement draws the couple’s attention from the match to the shore and to the question of where the birds go at night.

The answer unfolds in a specific pattern: gulls dip over the travellers’ heads, drop towards the bay and join hundreds floating on calm water beneath the protection of a rock fin. Moth observes that the birds are sleeping on the water and treats the sheltered bay as a safe place, saying he would live there if he could. He also imagines being brought back there when their ordeal is over. The scene gives the gulls a practical relation to refuge: they are not simply flying past but settling in a protected place. Their apparent security becomes a point of comparison for two people whose own shelter is a tent and whose future remains uncertain.

At Harbour Cove, the birds’ use of the shore is quieter but no less precise. The tent sits low among the dunes, hopefully beyond the reach of dog walkers and the tide. The refilled river leaves a strip of sand where oystercatchers run in chattering lines; farther down, terns huddle, while herring gulls gather farther still. Each group keeps to its own patch. The scene presents a shore partitioned among birds, with the travellers’ tent occupying a temporary place near the margins of human use. Later, after the surfers have gone and the tide has receded, birds come to claim the emptied beach, running and calling between sand and water through the night. Their return follows the tide and the departure of people, not the walkers’ timetable.

Foraging in Human Places

In the busier surroundings of St Ives, gulls are conspicuous near the places where people eat. They mass by a fish-and-chip shop, retaining a preference for fish but willing to take whatever opportunity presents itself. Their swooping attempts sometimes succeed. The birds remain part of the same street scene as the radio and the crowd, but they are governed by a sharp attention to food and openings—qualities the walkers discover at close range.

Ray and Moth buy one large pasty from a shop claiming to be the best, the oldest and the original. Sitting on the harbour among people eating chips and ice cream, they dangle their feet over a concrete wall. Ray holds the pasty in its grease-stained paper and tries to make it last: the filling is soft beef, potatoes and swede, with enough gravy to be satisfying without running down a hand. A particularly fierce-looking gull watches from the boat-trip shed, its eye fixed on the food. Ray keeps one eye on the bird, but not behind her. A rush of air and a scrape across her head announce the theft; the gull takes the pasty and flies off, leaving her holding the empty bag. The loss is comic, but the episode also shows how quickly a meal that has become precious can be taken by an animal better adapted to the crowded harbour’s opportunities.

The birds’ presence persists as Moth disappears into the St Ives crowd. Ray notices that he has moved smoothly, without the stutter of pain, and feels dislocated by their brief separation after they have spent so much time together. Nearby, gulls gather around the fish-and-chip shop and continue their opportunistic raids. Their activity does not answer Ray’s fear that Moth might not return; it carries on alongside it, indifferent to the human crisis unfolding in the same public space. That contrast makes the street feel both crowded and isolating.

The pattern recurs in Mevagissey. The mass of herring gulls ahead signals arrival before the village itself is reached. They gather on fishing boats and chimneys, wait around bins and loiter by benches, displaying the same pack-hunting appearance Ray remembers from St Ives. Ray and Moth buy a one-pound cone of chips to share and take turns eating and keeping watch. The precaution proves insufficient: a gull takes its chance amid an upturning flurry of chips and escapes with battered fish. Across the two towns, the birds’ behaviour repeats, but so does the walkers’ effort to eat carefully and make a small purchase last. Human vigilance can reduce the opening, not remove it.

Rhythm, Agency and Narrative Significance

The gulls also belong to the path’s forward motion. Along the coast, pain and hunger rise and fall into a rhythm, while wind moves the water and gulls seem to guide the walkers onward. Their appearance does not make the route easier or turn the coast into a safe passage; rather, the birds provide a recurring point of attention within a landscape that continually changes with each rise, corner and drop. Near Kelsey Head, the headland seems to draw every living thing into competition for space. A rock called the Chick is crowded with herring gulls, black-backed gulls, oystercatchers, cormorants and terns, their noise overwhelming the sound of the sea rushing through a gap. The walkers leave the birds to their crowded rock, pass the abandoned army camp at Penhale, and descend to Perranporth Beach. Here the birds are part of a place with its own pressures and occupants, not a decorative backdrop arranged around the human journey.

Across these scenes, gulls move between flight, rest, feeding and noisy competition, each behaviour tied to a particular setting: the cliff, the protected bay, the divided beach, the crowded harbour and the fishing village. Their recurring presence gives the coast a living rhythm independent of the walkers, while their ability to find shelter and food makes visible what the travellers lack: a secure home and a meal that cannot be snatched away. Yet the birds do not function only as symbols of hardship. Their night calls, communal settling on water and return to an emptied beach remain their own activities, governed by shore, tide and opportunity. That combination of independence and proximity makes them enduring companions in the book’s account of life outdoors—near enough to watch, impossible to control, and always already at home in the changing coastal world.