This picture was taken looking back along the coast track towards the village from a point about half a mile to the north of Golspie. The ploughed field on the right, part of the Sutherland Estate, has extensive sandy patches but the pale area towards the bottom right of the picture isn't sand but....
....a mass of seashells which have been turned up by the plough. The shelly area in the picture is about ten foot across, and the shells are....
....mainly winkles - 'wilks' or 'welks' on the west coast - along with limpets, cockles and mussels.
While there may be other good explanations for this pile of shells - farmers often scattered them to add calcium carbonate to acid fields - this may be a midden, a human rubbish tip, created when a few of our ancestors sat down together to enjoy a meal of shellfish which they had collected from the weed-covered rocks on the lower beach not thirty yards away.
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