Tuesday, March 31, 2020

An Empty Beach

We're getting to know Golspie's south beach pretty well now and have learned that, while it's a superb beach with miles of sand, it isn't the most exciting of beaches. For a start not much gets washed up onto it, bar the occasional....

....dead bird or fish - this is a shag who looks all ready to be fossilised to be rediscovered in a few million years' time.

So for Fulton Mackay's wonderful character, Ben Knox, in the film 'Local Hero' this beach would have been useless. Ben lived on and from the beach which Texan 'Mac' MacIntyre needed to buy in order to build Knox Oil's new terminal but Ben wouldn't sell, not even for enough money to buy any beach in the world, an offer he refused because he could not gauge whether any other beach would provide a livelihood through the flotsam that was washed up on it.

Ben Knox came to mind as we walked the beach this morning, sharing it with fewer than half-a-dozen other walkers. It may not be a beach that Ben would have favoured but if one is looking for peace, solitude and huge expanses of lonely sea and sky, it's a great beach.

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