The ancient coastal paint palette

What exactly is ochre, you ask? Well, it’s an earth pigment containing iron oxides. The mineral- and fossil-rich cliffs on this stretch of the coast are full of the stuff. The colours range from a golden yellow to deep orange, rust red and brown: they remind me of the Indian spices in my mother’s cabinet: turmeric, paprika, curry powder and cumin. Ochre was one of the first paints used by man.

A 70,000-year-old ochre cave painting found in South Africa is thought to be the oldest work of art in the world. Australian Aboriginals have used ochre in their art, as have prehistoric cultures in southern Europe. The women of the Himba tribe in Namibia still adorn their bodies with the pigment mixed with animal fat. The Maoris in New Zealand mixed fish oil with ochre to paint their war canoes – and stop the wood from drying out – and here in Britain ochre was used for preserving sail cloth on old fishing boats.

Ancient artists would have had to harvest and transform the raw pigment before the creative urge took hold. Back then painting meant making your paints too. Connecting with the land was part of the deal. Happily, that slow, organic way of creating is back in vogue. Our plan is to collect the ochre with Sean and walk to Port Mulgrave, tucked beyond a headland two miles away. Here we’ll rendezvous with Tricia, have lunch and make the paints. You absolutely don’t have to be an artist to enjoy this: today is all about the beach adventure and the slow, sensuous enjoyment of the doing, not the end product.

We’re very much at the mercy of the sea: it’s only safe to walk on the foreshore on low-tide days. Consequently, these coastal paint palette days run every couple of weeks. ‘It doesn’t matter what’s going on in our lives or the world,’ says Sean, as we set off. ‘Every day, for all of eternity, the tide rolls in and the tide rolls out.’ He’s quite a character, is Sean. Fishing aside, he’s travelled the world as a fisheries advisor, serves as a lifeboat helmsman and can hold his own with seasoned explorers and anglers alike. But put him on the beach and he morphs into a beachcomber, forager and fossil-hunter bursting with child-like enthusiasm: it’s not surprising he was recently named in a national newspaper as one of the world’s ten top tour guides.

The foreshore is full of treasure so it’s hard not to dawdle. We pause to nibble on tasty – and, as the name suggests, peppery – pepper dulse (a kind of seaweed) and run our hands over moss-covered rocks in search of jet. The semi-precious stone is black, unpolished in its natural state and hard with brown markings. ‘Hang on to this,’ Sean tells me, when I find a jaggedy bit. ‘You can sandpaper it and wear it as a pendant.’ When Sean puts a hammer to a smooth, egg-shaped rock, it splits in the middle to reveal perfectly formed ammonites, marine fossils millions of years old. We make beach-style brass rubbings of them, using muslin and bits of charcoal.

‘It’s a simple activity but you’re creating a memory that, in a way, is more resonant than any photo,’ says Sean, pouring steaming coffee for us from a flask and handing out chocolates. The temptation simply to lean against the rocks, listen to the seabirds and stare out to sea all day is almost overwhelming, but there is paint to be foraged.

The cliffs are dotted with old cave-like mine workings that wouldn’t look out of place in an Enid Blyton tale. Sean crawls into one and I follow on my hands and knees, crouching low. (This bit is optional: I was game, you don’t have to be.) Inside, it smells faintly metallic. The walls are slimy and covered with glistening, orange streaks of gunge. This is the ochre, ripe for shaving and hoarding in a tub. Outside the cave, another of our small group is scraping away at a rock, quite literally unearthing her precious bright-yellow treasure.