THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

The conditions of an ideal retreat from the tumult and artificialities of man are fulfilled – solitude, danger, strangeness, the unknown, the discoverable, the eventual means of escape – if our hermitage is an island.  An island volcanic or coralline, an island that out of the mists of daybreak, or in the cheating lights of evening, lifts itself from the snows of its surges, serene, strange, aloof in its forlorn beauty, dumb clock of countless ages, the haven of a few birds and roving brutes, the kindly nursery of seal and sea lion, and green with palm and tamarisk.

De la Mare/Islands