Cool mackerel-haunted seas

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

Here she describes a summer locale favored by her family in England in language that is similar in style to that later marvelous observer of nature, Gerald Durrell.

Salcombe and Peak, the twin enclosing cliffs of Sidmouth, were beautiful, dramatic and seemingly sky-high. To boat picnics at Ladrum Bay or Branscombe we were slowly and peacefully rowed by Bob and Tom Woolley through timeless afternoons under the sheer reflected red cliffs. Long ribbons of seaweed undulated below the cool mackerel-haunted seas, whose tidal flow seemed to me, then and since, far more delectable in its changing greys and greens and shadowy hyacinth colours, its alternating deeps and shallows, than the monotonous blue champagne of the Mediterranean. There were shrimps and prawns in plenty in the rocks below High Peak, endless clear tide-washed pools of limpets, anemones and grass-green weed.