fieldnotes from a fishing town

Last year I spent some time in the fishing town of Brixham, Devon, doing fieldwork for my dissertation on a pilot community data trust. Something I love about ethnography is how it embraces the researcher alongside the subject, the experience of the research as necessary to the write-up as anything else. Lots of what I recorded in Brixham didn’t make it into my dissertation, but here are some snippets from my iPhone notes app and frames of film.

On my first visit to Brixham I sit alone in a stone-walled pub on the harbour. There’s a group of firefighters at the table next to me getting progressively louder, angsty guitar playing from the speaker above us. My first days of research make every interaction feel loaded. I feel constantly alert. Should I try to strike up conversation with people drinking alongside me? How much do I try to glean from an interaction with the cashier in the Co-Op? Shall I make a note of the man who lectured me about naval history in case it becomes relevant, or for if I run low on participants? I record everything.

In July it’s warm enough for us to sit out on the terrace of the seafood restaurant, drinking negronis as the sun sets. Water breaks around the slick head of a seal lurking for snacks from departing boats. Bursts of seagulls explode above the harbour line, framed against a sunset. Cloudless but for puffs of fishers’ smoke as they unload the catch. Trawler lights flick on across the harbour as the light fades, doubled in the sea below. We discuss a rock determinedly sticking out of the ocean beyond the breakwater, waves breaking on its sides. It’s too small for Google Maps to record its existence, but nonetheless requires acknowledgement from every boat chugging out beyond the harbour into the ocean, navigating carefully around it.

I sit on the docks with my eyes closed, attempting a sensory ethnography of the catch as it’s brought in. There’s a smell of petroleum fumes coming off the water, yelling from the fishers and the clank of chains bringing up box after box from the belly of the boats. A clack of sacks of scallops hitting the pallets, their cartoon outlines clear against the weave. The whizz of the forklift powering down the boardwalk as a trawler pushes off. A belch of black smoke, ripples fanning out around the hull. Reflections of the gulls flapping close to the water to pick up cast-off fish guts; the suggestion of something larger under the surface, a brown, buoy-like head.

I watch everyone walk the length of the breakwater and back on a sunny later afternoon. I love how many people here have buggies for their older dogs. They still want to bring them to see the sea and smell the spray and be transported down old routes that they can no longer wander with their arthritic little legs. It’s always moving - people’s love for their dogs.

I climb the steep steps above the harbour to watch golden hour over layers of rooftops that spread upwards from the centre of town, perched against the hills above the sea. The marina is visible from here, grandparents pointing out the different boats above the soothing sound of masts clanging. The new tidal bell gently bongs on the shore, and further out to sea the pancake-flat surface is broken by a pod of dolphins diving towards Berryhead.

In the latter half of my fieldwork I stay further inland, away from the sea. The walk back up the hill is always longer than I remember it, the hill always steeper. The pavements so narrow that two way pedestrian traffic necessitates stepping into the road in a polite game of chicken. Living room windows are at eyelevel, and I nosily stare at a sunbleached note taped to the glass, offering a service that is no longer legible; patterned curtains and an atmosphere of gentle cosiness beyond. A serious cat on the next window ledge which I try to attract, before blurred movement in its dark front room makes me embarrassed. Glazed glass giving inscrutable views of mysterious ornamental objects; a rock salt lamp casting a hellish glow. A couple sitting on iPads at opposite sides of a living room, each with a personal reading lamp.

The sunset tonight is painfully beautiful, spread out across the sky and into the sea, hanging over the bay in pink wisps. I use almost a whole roll of film photographing it from every angle, catching waves breaking over the tidal pool and already out of frames by the time I’m back quayside with a red sun hanging low over the water. The boardwalk is creaking ominously and the wind and the waves beyond the breakwater are high. Despite the clear skies I wouldn’t want to be on the sea tonight.

Since my last visit a lot of scaffolding as come down and things look different. I second guess my routes through town, although I’m usually walking the same three streets. I find myself surprised to recognise the same people over and over. The young man with a huge eagle tattoo up his neck who walks past me in a supermarket and nods at me on the harbour the next day; a waitress who serves me at the fish restaurant and I see holding flowers outside Tesco two evenings later; the old bald man I keep seeing who is perhaps multiple old bald men.

Walking down past Saint Mary’s Church, the traditional boundary between Cowtown in Fishtown, I cut through its churchard full of graves to fishers and farmers. A tall stone monument to unidentified sailors shipwrecked at Brixham; a lichen covered anchor and chain, paid for by the Sailors’ Relief Committee. This boundary used to be a site of vicious brawls between Brixham’s residents of the land and of the sea, although the distinction fades in death.

I look up from my book and a dark sea has suddenly filled the train windows where before it was hills and sunset. Its boils in the dusk, white horses skimming waves that are only a few shades darker than the grey blue sky.