The creel thing

I'm fascinated by this pile of lobster creels at the back of our local beach: snares for unwary crustaceans, their inert materials (metal, plastic, rope and rubber) take on an almost organic quality as the grass grows around them.

Creels look homemade but are in fact purchased from suppliers at the cost of around £50 each. Once they were made of basketwork and used for conveying all manner of things.

The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie has written a haunting poem called The Creel

The world began with a woman,
shawl-happed, stooped under a creel,
whose slow step you recognise
from troubled dreams. You feel

obliged to help bear her burden
from hill or kelp-strewn shore,
but she passes by unseeing
thirled to her private chore.

It's not sea birds or peats she's carrying,
not fleece, nor the herring bright
but her fear that if ever she put it down
the world would go out like a light.

The sort of woman she had in mind probably looked like this.