Atonement

Watched Atonement last night - beautiful film, but really bloody miserable - so today's PlatformCat experience comes straight from the beaches of Dunkirk (or, at least, the very top bit of North Yorkshire).

After twenty million hours on buses (via a Scotch egg, and a "Midget" (?) pork pie. in a rainstorm in Guisborough), I finally arrived at some sort of post-war council estate by Marske Cricket Ground. My newest OS map (covering Middlesbrough ad Hartlepool) directed me, through a selection of winding boulevards and crescents, until I finally reached Marske station. Marske is on the Northern Rail line from Middlesbrough to Saltburn, but I didn't wait for a train...

Marske

After various failed attempts at getting a decent selfie, I finally got one I didn't hate, and headed off towards the coast. Towards Middlesbrough, the next station is Longbeck, and then Redcar East, but they weren't built when the Big Tile Map was produced, so I chose to ignore them entirely, for the sake of accuracy. I trotted off down the High Street, which is actually quite nice - so much better than I expected. Architectually it's quite moorland-village-y, despite it's proximity to dirty Teesside, with little shops and cottages - one of which is now a folk museum called "Winkie's Castle", but sadly it was closed for the day...

The rain that dampened my baked-goods in Guisborough was long gone now, and as I crossed the dunes and made my way onto the beach, the sun was high in the sky. It was windy and cold (much more autumnal than you'd expect for August), but the sky was blue and it was really, really beautiful. And it was so empty! Apart from a few dog-walkers, I had miles of sand to myself! A splendid way to get rid of the day's hangover! (Oops!)

But anyway, as Marske receded into the distance behind me, the only sounds were the sea, the odd  tweeting sandpiper, and crickets in the dunes. My face was gradually covered in a layer of salt, from the wind whipping spray into the air - thankfully the lack of passers-by meant nobody saw me licking my beard to taste it...

I didn't find any treasure on the beach. The best I could manage was a pink glittering heart, made of felt, a selection of assorted flipflops (including a matching pair, over a mile apart - murder vistim perhaps?), and a large dead jellyfish. Or, at least, I presume it was dead. I'm not sure how you're supposed to tell.

I gave up on beach-walking, and made my way up onto the dunes instead, which almost as abruptly became a concrete promenade, as I approached the suburbs of Redcar.

Now, what to say about Redcar? From what I saw of it today, the town itself is fairly boring, and a bit shabby, but the seafront... well, let's just say I think that's where the council spend their money. Who needs decent shops when you could have an array of bizarre and entertaining public artworks?

I must have passed at least thirty different sculptures. My favourite was definitely the group of cast iron penguins hanging around a bin, but there were so many others - the thing that looked like a squid crossed with a flaming boat, the wooden camel on a roundabout that may or may not have been being ridden by the Virgin Mary, the creepy metal scene of Mister Punch being attacked by a crocodile - there was even a pair of knitted octopi attached to a fence!

If Redcar was just about sculptures, I'm sure people would come from far and wide. But...

It's not.

Sadly for the town's tourist industry, the view north is dominated by industry. The place really is a frontier - look to the right and it's all cliffs and moors, but look left and there's chimneys and smoke and conveyor belts and... well, it's basically the edge of Middlesbrough. If you breathed in hard enough it'd probably taste like a chemical-flavoured parmo...

But anyway - ignoring all that, by now I was right in the middle of where they filmed the Dunkirk scenes of Atonement. Since it was made in 2007 there's been quite a lot of sea-defence works, so it looks somewhat different, but the main features are still obvious. The houses on the landward side are still the same, and the stub-end of Coatham Pier (now a manky-looking cinema) is there, but alas, I didn't see James McAvoy... Gutted.

I wandered up Station Road (there must be hundred of those round the country), to Redcar Central and took a picture of myself on the footbridge between the platforms. The trainshed has been bricked up to form business units, so the services to Saltburn and inland have to sneak their way round the sides, but at least it's still open...

On the footbridge at Redcar 

Originally I'd got a vague plan of somehow carrying on towards Middlesbrough today, but I couldn't be bothered, so I bought a bottle of apple juice, and waited for the next bus towards Whitby, where I digress...

Surprisingly, Whitby station - for a long time a virtually abandoned backwater - has just opened a new platform!  Instead of being an awkward single track (practically a siding), it's now a proper terminus with two platforms, and the facility for locomotive hauled trains to run-around. I'm not sure who paid for it, but I think it was Network Rail.

You don't get that every day...