Views

This picture was taken this morning shortly after half-past nine as we walked along Golspie's slightly run-down promenade, looking across the village's beach and jetty and an almost mirror-calm sea to the south coast of the Moray Firth. It's one of several pictures I've taken recently of local views, not always with any purpose but sometimes....

....in an attempt to record how fleeting the detail can be. This is part of Golspie's south beach where, for reasons best known to the sea, sand has been carefully arranged to form a featureless plain while only a mile further south....

....the sea has taken great bites out of the same beach. Quite why it left a meandering mini-canyon is, like so many things the sea does, a mystery, and when we return to this same section of beach during the coming week this feature will, no doubt, have been erased.

This constant movement does have some interesting historical consequences. One recent low tide exposed what appears to be an old wall formed of rocks angling out from the shore. We've walked this part of the beach often enough before and have never noticed it and, probably, when we return that way it will have been obscured again. It interests me because elsewhere such water-walls have turned out to be old and often very cleverly constructed fish traps.

We are so fortunate that the open views we can choose to enjoy from our walks along the coastlines to the south and north of the village are in such contrast to the enclosed views we can opt for if, instead, we turn inland and upwards into the forested areas to the west of us, where a rather colour-muted autumn is in process. At such times we are often looking, not at views but....

....at the ground at our feet in search of beauties like this, a rather fine shaggy parasol fungus.