1. www.iankenworthy.com
Below is an excerpt from The Whispering Sand: By Ian Kenworthy
Chapter 1 of The
Whispering Sand by Ian Describing Gull Cove Cottage
Kenworthy.
Atop a cliff bathed in glowing sunshine,
surrounded by fields of tall grasses stood
Gull Cove Cottage. Despite the name it
did not take much more than a brief
glance to tell that it was
not a cottage at all. You
see Gull Cove Cottage could never have been designed, and if it had then the man who
did the designing would very quickly have found himself without a job. At one point long
ago it had been a bungalow but since then it had evolved into something else entirely.
Made of unorthodox red bricks, which were anything but
square, the mere sight of the cottage’s strained exterior Activity 1: Draw a table like the one below. In
could make people a little queasy. Like the bricks all the the Features column write down as many of
windows were of odd sizes and shapes as though they the features of Gull Cove cottage as you can. In
had been haphazardly placed to fit holes in the walls. On the Description column you need to write
the far side of the cottage overlooking the bay was one down how the writer describes the feature. In
huge round window and nearby a smaller one that in the What it Means? column write down what
many ways resembled a rose. It was perhaps the most the description tells you about the feature.
beautiful part of the house, a familiar shape in amongst Features Description What it Means?
the irregularity. Set into the sloping roof with its tooth-
Eg. Towers A cluster of Close together
like tiles was what could have been a dormer window
corkscrew-necked Tall, twisty
except that from inside it a tower grew which was topped giraffes
by so many smaller towers that it looked like cluster of
corkscrew necked giraffes. Sprouting like a tree the tower
was narrow near the bottom but the higher up it went the Roof tiles tooth-like uneven
more twisted it became. Right near the top, which would
have been the fourth storey if it were a common enough shape to have storeys, the thin towers split
into a forest of small pointed towers and chimneys each with its own windows, little tiled roof and in
most cases a gull’s nest. Right at the very top, surrounded by all the little towers, was the cottage’s
crowning piece; the great big tower window. By all accounts the house looked worryingly unsafe but,
having stood at a cliff edge for more years than anyone could remember, it could obviously withstand a
regular lashing from the wind and rain. To the casual eye it looked to be on the verge of collapse and
even a momentary glimpse at the array of tentacle towers could make the legs weak. A person who was
trying to sell a house like this would have said that Gull Cove Cottage had charm. That was true, it did
have charm, but what it really needed was scaffolding.
Activity 2: As you arrive home from school you find a brochure on your Activity 3: Read through the description of
bed. It claims to be from Gull Cove Holiday Co. and there is a short
Gull Cove Cottage again. Draw an annotated
paragraph describing places of interest. The main point of interest it lists is
Gull Cove Cottage. Write down what you think the paragraph might say. diagram of the cottage (Annotate is a posh
word meaning ‘label’).
Eg. If you find yourself in Gull Cove then you really must find time to visit E.g.
Gull Cove Cottage. The Cottage is... Towers
Gull’s nest
Ian Kenworthy would like to exercise his moral right to remind you that he wrote this and it is his intellectual property. You can you use it for
personal and educational use but no making money from it. Thank you.