Where the Atlantic meets the land

Bella Sweeny and Terry Gallagher had a holiday, and were spending it upon the rocks at Kilcross. He was a groom and she was a maid at 'the big house,' some miles inland, and this was her first visit to the place. He had been there several times before, and was doing the honors of the scenery. They had been 'coortin'' for some time, and he sat with his arm round her waist, in silence for the most part, punctuated by occasional references to the local names for heads of the landscape: he kept severely to facts, with the practical mind of the peasant class from which he sprang.

The point at which they found themselves was the innermost end of the long line of black-faced cliffs, where the rocky strata suddenly ceased and gave way to the sandy lowlands. The rock upon which they were seated was a single flat slab, which extended a hundred yards into the sea, forming a natural breakwater for the little cove behind them. To their right there stretched inland a couple of miles of yellow glistening strand, which merged gradually in the tufted bent-grass and rounded hillocks of the dunes which sloped to meet it at high-water mark. At the furthest point of sight in this direction the rocky strata cropped up again in the shape of an immense reef which stretched out half a mile into the sea, and now at low tide lay like a gigantic alligator on the surface of the water. When the tide was full its jagged points were completely covered, and only a thread of surf was left to warn the fisherman of its hidden dangers.

'This rock that we're a-settin' on,' said Terry, 'is called the Yeough Flag, from the fishes they catch off ov it: an' yon big wan out there is Carrick Fad: an' that wan is the Connaughtman's Rock, where a boat's load from Connaught was wrecked wan winter's night an' all han's lost.' He pointed as he spoke to a spot in the sea beside them, where a mat of long golden brown wrack floated flush with the surface, and the swell broke gently with a soft gurgle and a few air-bubbles.

Behind them and to their left the cliffs rose two hundred feet in the air as they soared seaward. The first fifty feet were formed of crumbling slate, above that came a layer of gravelly soil which was scooped out in regular scollops by land slips and seamed and scarred by winter torrents. At the extreme point of the bay the rock was hollowed out beneath by the constant dash of the surf, and the bank sloping more gently overhead was clothed with the long rank grass which has never known a scythe, coarse like the hairs of a horse's tail. The diamond-shaped point where the two met cut sharply into the sky-line. Beyond that point the cliffs became one solid wall of beetling rock.

The space between the base of the cliffs and the edge of the water in the cove was covered with boulders piled pell-mell on top of each other: they were of every size, from a trunk to a small house, and of every shape: here a square-shaped block lay like a stranded whale and there a thin slab was tilted edgeways towards the sky. The débris of the Atlantic flung by winter storms here upon its outermost verge, looking like the deposit of some huge primeval glacier.

'Yon's the Cormorants' Rock,' interjected Terry, alluding to the pointed headland, 'an' there's a cormorant,' as he pointed to a black speck winging its way with steady flight low down across the water.

Then he continued with a sudden change of subject, blurting out the words as though they blistered his tongue, 'Bella, darlin', don't you think we've waited long enough? I've got enough to marry on now. When shall we be called?' He had been nerving himself for this effort all the morning, and gave a great sigh of relief now that it was over.