Tim Knight - Photography

Rock Pools

Eight or ten hours of a sleety day in February which he had spent, cold and hungry, wading in the shallows of the Firth of Forth .... 'I had nothing to eat or drink, I was wet through, my hands were half-frozen, and I was chilled to the marrow; but, gentlemen, I was amply rewarded: I became the happy possessor of no less than three of these beautiful creatures, these Dorises (sea slugs)' and he held up a phial containing three hardly visible little bladder like animals.

Charles Darwin recalling Robert Grant

Robert Grant

Rusey Beach

September, Tregardock Beach

Tregardock Beach

I look at one of the trays that a particularly adventurous group of girls have collected and it is full of marine life, including shrimps, gobies, a hermit crab and even an anemone on a rock. They have done well and it saddens me that being outdoors like this is no longer a feature of education anymore. Days like today, although good enough to have set Darwin on his tracks, are not seen as being useful now unless they can be dressed up as a way of encouraging the pupils involved to become ‘self managers’. As if becoming a willing cog in the corporate machine is of superior value to an appreciation of the complexity of life and its struggle to live, breed, breathe and feed that is happening now as I write within each of these rocky pools.