With another of those grey Highland days in prospect we drove to a small car park which gives access to the beach about half way between Golspie and Littleferry, finding the tide falling and, looking back towards Golspie, not another soul on the beach, although....
....looking the other way there were two people - inevitably dog-walkers - approaching the mouth of Loch Fleet and two more on the other side, walking the beach by Coul Links.
We are so very lucky to have a four kilometre long beach almost entirely to ourselves mostly, it seems to me, because the majority of Golspie's many dog owners don't seem to bother themselves with taking their precious pooches for a good run along open sands, something which, in my perhaps limited experience, dogs adore.
Even the wildlife along the beach seem sparse. Oystercatchers predominated along the tide line, accompanied by the occasional curlew - how do they fly with that beak? - but when we left the beach near Littleferry and turned inland....
....we were met by a pair of stonechats which had staked out an extensive territory of rough grassland to keep them in insects and seeds through the winter.
On our way back to the car along the links we climbed the highest of the many mounds that are scattered across this area. I am not sure how they formed, whether by the action of the sea or by our human ancestors creating them, perhaps as tumuli to cover a burial - stone tools and other artefacts have been found in the area.
While some of the fungi are still 'flowering' most are blackened or mushy, except for this little branching fungus growing on the side of a mound of moss. It's a club fungus, perhaps the apricot club,
Clavulinopsis luteoalba, which is found on grassland.
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