For whom the bell tolls

 

 

     This is the Time and Tide Bell at Bosta on the small island of Bernera, off Lewis. As that link will tell you, it's part artwork, part data-recording apparatus and is one of a series of such bells to be situated around the British coast.

    When we were at Bosta two weeks ago we arrived when the tide was more or less at its highest point and we were very taken by the bell and its quite eerie, mournful ring - think of La cathédrale engloutie and the legend of Ys. As we swam (or, in the case of the one without a costume, photographed the wild flowers) and picnicked, so the tide receded until the bell could be reached on foot across the skerries and its music had stopped, but I'm so glad we were there in time to hear it.

    (And here for good measure is Donne's poem).

Comments

[Ruth M.]

We do a lot of small boat cruising in our own Chesapeake Bay, very slow and leisurely in our displacement-hull diesel Albin 25. (No high-speed speedboats for us.) My favorite navigation aids are the bell buoys that ring when the seas are strong enough. My Bill cuts the boat in a tight circle around them to make them ring for me.

[Lindsay]

One thinks of that village off the Suffolk coast - Dunwich, is it called?

PS I thought skerries were little rocky islands?

[Cornflower]

They are indeed - also reefs of rock, which is what the bell is fixed to.