Anyone who has followed this blog will know that I think beaches are peculiarly special places, places where land, sea and air mix in a constantly changing environment; so it's not surprising that we spend a great deal of our time walking, increasingly gently, along the various beaches to the north and south of Golspie.
Every beach, wherever it is, has its personality. This beach lies to the northeast of Golspie, between the village and Dunrobin Castle, and....
....if there's anything special about it, it is that it often hosts waders such as these redshanks. It's one of a particular type of beach, a beach which doesn't boast clean, smooth and extensive sands but is narrow, dark, and, because it's slightly.... grubby, isn't a popular beach with humans - though this one, as can be seen in the top photo, once had a jetty or landing stage or some such construction formed of wood.
This is another of these lonely beaches, the beach at Lazy Lagoon near Bagamoyo to the north of Dar-es-Salaam, the photo taken soon after sunrise. It's a beach with bundles of personality, a beach where we watched fishermen working a long net from the shore, where, as at the Dunrobin beach, there were often flocks of waders, and a beach which was extra special because we found three species of quite rare cowries there.
However, the classic example of this sort of beach is Palisados beach on the sea-side of the long spit which forms Kingston harbour in Jamaica. It's a pebble beach, a very grubby beach with all sorts of rubbish washed up including, in this picture, a small cargo ship. We never used to swim off it because the undertow was too dangerous but we did dip baby Katy in it, almost feeding her to a passing shark.
That was what was so special about this beach: the fishing. Jackfish, snook, shark, barracuda and many other species could be caught if you knew how to fish it - on a still early morning, on a rising tide, and with a spinner or plug. We fished it often, never caught much, but loved it for its peace, solitude and spectacular sunrises.
Didn't we just!
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