The Open Beach

Now that the tides are low around midday it seems almost automatic that our daily walk is taken along the beach even when, as happened yesterday, we intended only a short stroll around the town. There is something infinitely soothing about an open beach, with only the bubble and suck of the waves and the cry of the seabirds for company - in almost three hours wandering this morning we saw only four other people, and none of them seemed inclined to talk.

Nor does there seem any desperate need to find anything interesting along the sands, though it is good when we spot something, like this little shell, what the English call a winkle and the Scots a 'whelk' or 'wilk', Littorina littorina, which used to turn up in their thousands from the kelp beds along Ardnamurchan's shores, yet this is the first we have found here.

That said, it's always good when an unusual object does catch our eye, something we can't explain, like this calcerous growth around a pebble. We've seen something similar before, a hard white, but sometimes pink crust around the edges of shallow rock pools, but how the material accumulates around a pebble is a mystery.

The seabirds give us endless pleasure. In the past, curlews have always seemed an unfriendly bird but the local ones allow us to approach, as do....

....the friendly oystercatchers and sanderlings, feeding together in groups of up to fifty along the tideline.

We try as far as possible not to disturb them, though if we do they fly out to sea and turn quickly to settle back onto the beach. They and the redshanks seem to be the main winter residents and it will be interesting to see which species replaces the sanderlings when they fly north as winter leaves us.

Even though it is two weeks since the solstice, the days remain very dark. This picture was taken shortly before midday with the sun still behind the same strip of grey cloud where it was sitting when we set out at ten. Only once in today's walk did the skies brighten, and then only for a few minutes, when we imagined what this beach would be like if the sky was blue and the temperature twenty degrees higher.