Fleswick Bay Sandstone, St Bees

Sandstone fingers in Fleswick Bay, St Bees near Whitehaven on the West Cumbria Coast.
Wonderful rippling in the water-sculpted platforms of St. Bees Sandstone, formed in the Triassic Period about 200 million years ago.

"The stone is grained,
Smooth as walnut turned on a lathe,
Or hollowed in clefts and collars where the pebbles
Shake up and down like marbles in a bottle.
Here the chiselling edges of the waves
Scoop long fluted grooves, and here the spray
Pits and pocks the blocks like rain on snow
Slowly the rock un-knows itself."

Norman Nicholson.
From The seven rocks: St Bees’ sandstone’.
(Norman Nicholson, Collected poems. Ed. Neil Curry. Faber & Faber 1994)