Fenella Beach
- Emma Butler
- Sep 13, 2024
- 4 min read
I've been creating a series of pebble pictures from the North (Ramsey beach), East (Laxey beach) and South (Castletown beach) of the Island and needed a Western beach to finish off the quartet. Peel beach seemed like the obvious choice, but as it's sandy, it wasn't suitable. Then I remembered Fenella Beach with its beautiful scallop shells and realised it would make the perfect final piece for the series. Working on the picture got me thinking about why so many scallop shells end up on this beach, and as I researched I found some other interesting facts. Read on to find out more.
Fenella Beach is actually the Isle of Man's newest beach. It was formed in the 1700's when the causeway, linking the town of Peel to St Patrick's Isle, was built. It's strange to think of people having to wait until low tide to walk or ride their horses across to the island, and even once it was built, at first the causeway was only wide enough for foot traffic. This narrow causeway can be seen in a photo on the Manx Nostalgia Facebook page. In the late 1800's the causeway was widened and a road built around part of the isle, as this photo from the 1930's shows:
If you want to read some information on St Patrick's Isle and the structures found there, there's a useful page here. As impressive as the fortified structures are, I was on the beach for the shells and when I first visited to take photos, the whole beach was covered with them. When I returned a couple of months later, there was much more sand to be seen and scallop shells were visible in a bank towards the back of the beach and in the wash as the waves were pulled back into the sea.
Many of the the scallop shells are in pieces that have been rounded by the action of the water, wearing down and smoothing any sharp edges. I'm always amazed at the variety of colours that they show.
By why are the shells here in such quantities? Apparently, the shells are actually the waste product of the scallop industry on the Isle of Man and the shells have been dumped in large quantities from the nearby Peel Hill. Fenella beach is at just the right angle to catch these shells as they are moved by the tidal currents up the coast towards Peel.
While researching Fenella Beach, I found an electronic publication by Patricia Tutt called 'Fenella Beach: The Scallop Shells' that has only recently been published and appears to still be in draft form. If it remains available, it can be found on the issuu website and is full of gorgeous photography and observations of the beach. The introduction notes that the dumping of this waste has been ceased as of December 2023 and so the future nature of this beach is uncertain.
I also discovered that the name of the beach come from the character Fenella in Sir Walter Scott's 1823 novel 'Peveril of the Peak', which was set around Peel Castle. A large wooden sculpture of this character, carved by Nick Barlow, looks over the small cove.
I decided to work on a piece based on the photo below. I could have chosen a photo with some interesting pebbles as well as the shells, but the shells really are the main feature of this beach and I loved the large fan shape of the shell in the middle of this photo.
I realised I'd have to use quite a different set of colours for this piece and soon settled on my Schmincke Horadam watercolours as I have some interesting browns that mix to just the right range of hues.
I've previously used these colours to mix with some of my other watercolours to form very similar colours to some of those in the Schmincke Super Granulation range. I thought I'd include my swatches of these below to show the range of colours that can be achieved.
As usual with my mixed media pieces, I start with a pencil sketch and then add blocks of watercolour. This is a challenging subject to paint due to the lack of strong contrast in many areas of the picture and the pale colours of many of the shells. I used a weak application of raw umber for the pale areas and mixes of the mahogany brown or Mars brown with raw umber for the soft pink and brown areas. Mahogany brown and cobalt turquoise light formed a grey that I used under the black seaweed and to darken the mahogany brown and raw umber mix for the deeper purple shells.
After the watercolour is dry, I then add coloured pencil over the top to refine the colours and give detail and definition. As you can see, I haven't finished the artwork yet and there'll be many more hours of careful coloured pencil application before I'm done.
