Sanna Bay Beaches

We had the good fortune for over twenty years of our lives to live within a few miles of Sanna, a tiny crofting community which boasts some of Scotland's finest beaches. This view looks north across Sanna Bay towards Rum, Eigg and Muck, and shows how the bay is broken up into a series of smaller bays, and it is these, some of them only a few metres wide, which I think of as Sanna Bay beaches.

There were so many of them that, even when the car park at Sanna was full, each family could almost guarantee to have one of the bays to itself. However, we knew of many more Sanna Bay type beaches a few minutes' walk to the north and east of the settlement, this one being the nearest and a fine beach for beach cricket.

Each of these little beaches had its own personality. The one in the distance we called Shelly Beach because its sand was coarse and composed of often complete little shells, including the rare Arctic cowrie, for which we spent hours searching, while the one just visible in the foreground was one of our secret beaches, difficult to access and covered at high tide.

East Africa has many such beaches. This is Mangapwane beach, Zanzibar, a favourite of my mother's and one she took my brother and I to when we visited Zanzibar in 1950. In those days it was a lonely place with just a few fishing ngalowas pulled up onto its sands but these days it is much busier.

Jamaica too had its fair share of these tiny, enclosed bays. This is a very small one, the perfect size for these two small children, Elizabeth and Mark, but there were also slightly larger but still relatively uncrowded bays, for example....
 

....Boston Bay just to the north of Long Bay.

These little bay beaches are the most magical of places, enclosed, safe, friendly. In Jamaica, where life in the capital, Kingston, was stressful, they were the occasional reward for sticking with a tough job.