The Changing Beach

On Sunday the wind was so strong it knocked a high-sided truck over on the Dornoch Bridge, closing the A9 for a time. Along Golspie beach it chased ribbons of sand, picking grains up and lifting them so high that, in the gusts, they got into our eyes. The people visible in the photo, the only other human occupants of the beach, had a small dog with them, which must have been suffering.

By yesterday the wind had dropped to dead calm.

The beach is constantly changing its shape, moving sand up, then down, sculpting barriers of sand which hold back pools of water, then removing them. There's also a constant winnowing of the sediment so that....

 ....in places only sand is removed leaving even the smallest pebbles.

This constant change means that the beach is never the same two days running; as a consequence we find, more and more, that a wander along its sands is the default walk of the day.

Sometimes we have the sneaking suspicion that the wildfowl along the shore are becoming used to us. Normally, a redshank would fly off before we were in good camera range, but this one stood its ground, as always bobbing up and down as if feeling the stress.

We often see herons along the shore, and these do stand quite happily while we approach. They remind me of old men, stooped and thoughtful: they've seen it all before.

The linear boulder mound on which he stands runs parallel to the shore in front of the town promenade. It can be seen more clearly....

....in this picture taken from the north. I'm told it's an old coastal defence dating back to the time when the fishing village was expanded under the Sutherlands, when they were clearing families from the straths and finding them work - even though they might never have been to sea before.

There's some evidence in this OS map that the lines of boulders were there in 1873, holding back the shingle beach in front of the town, and....

....a much later line of rocks is clearly marked off the SW end of the town in this 1907 map: they are what old man heron now stands on, watching his world.