High Tide

This was high tide along Golspie's promenade at 10.30 this morning, the sea unexpectedly angry, there being little wind under a still, grey overcast.

At times like this the promenade is impassible for pedestrians as the bigger waves pick up pebbles and flotsam and throw them across it. The houses that back the promenade all have concrete walls and flood-defence gates, though in storm conditions many of their gardens are flooded.

The promenade's coastal defences were probably adequate in their time but global warming is reaching this small Scottish village. New flood defences are promised, and planned, and then replanned, so little has yet been achieved. That anything is happening at all is down to the A9, the major trunk road to Wick, Thurso and the Orkneys, which passes not fifty metres away from, and parallel to the promenade, so an exceptional storm might well cut it.

Maybe Golspie's new defences will only be expedited after such an event, preferably a relatively mild one, but one which sees the A9 flooded and impassible.