The Power of the Sea

Today's tide was perfect for a brisk morning walk along Golspie beach but we hadn't bargained for what the sea has been up to in the last few days, during which there's been a strong northerly blowing: the sand that forms the upper layers of the beach has almost totally disappeared, so the waves of low tide were right up against the rocks of the flood defences. This view shows the beach just before eleven, with low tide due at 11.03.

The extent to which the sand has been removed can be seen in this picture. Usually it's a couple of steps from the bottom of the ramp at the end of the town's promenade to the sand.

Rather than walk along the top of the flood defences, with the beach on our left and the golf course on our right, we....

....headed inland and climbed the lower slopes of Beinn Bhraggie, following the forest paths upwards until we could see....

....the whole length of the beach from Golspie to Littleferry. One local told us that, if the Golspie end of the beach loses its sand, it'll have been moved to the Littleferry end, but the picture shows the tide almost right in along the whole length of the beach.

Hopefully, the sand will come back in time for a brisk walk along the beach at Christmas.

Precious Books

This bookcase shelf in our snug houses most of my books about East Africa, varying from those my father bought to learn Swahili - on the right along with a couple of more recent Swahili books of mine - through to two novels by Robert Ruark on the left. In the middle are some of the books which have been with me since I was a boy in Mombasa, including volumes by JA Hunter, JH Patterson and Alastair Scobie which are full of the stirring adventures of men who risked their lives hunting dangerous game.

There are other fascinating stories as, for example, told in the book just to the left of the antelope, 'The Groundnut Affair'. This is an account of the attempt to turn a vast and totally unsuitable chunk of African bush into peanut farms just after the Second World War, a fiasco in which my father was involved inasfar as his ships would have been used to import machinery to clear the ground and export the crop from Tanga.

The novels are there because, occasionally, a novel manages to capture moments in history better than a non-fiction book, and this is certainly the case with 'Something of Value', Ruark's grim story of Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising.

It seems pointless continuing to trail these books around with me unless they serve a purpose, so I'm steadily reading my way through them. In some cases, such as 'In the Wake of Da Gama' - just to the right of the antelope - I'm probably reading them for the umpteenth time. No matter: they are great stories which mature with time.

A Chill Day at Littleferry

Today started cold and grey with a chill northwester blowing so we went to Littleferry for a brisk walk along the beach but had hardly started when, just at the point where Loch Fleet opens to the sea, we found....

....a charnel house of dead starfish, crabs, razor shells, mussels and other bivalves, something we have come across at the same place before - see earlier post here - but not with such a variety of species involved. There must be something about the environment at this point, where fresh water meets the sea, to explain these events.

We also found several small plaice, which took Mrs MW right back to her childhood because she was fed plaice fairly regularly and didn't particularly like it; worse, she had to walk all the way in to Gloucester with her mother to collect the plaice from a MacFisheries shop which used to display their fish on a big marble slab facing the pavement. So we didn't take any of them home for supper.

As we set off briskly along the beach the sun was just beginning to show on the hills at the back of Golspie and....

....had come out by the time we had walked a good mile or so and had decided to turn back. In all we met seven people along the beach - a crowd by our standards - a man with two dogs, two couples with one dog, and a young mother with her little boy and no dog.

However, as we cut across the links on a short cut back to the car the grey clouds had started to reappear and by the time we reached home the sun was finished for the day.

A Feast of Fungi

While the rest of the country is enjoying frost and snow we're suffering under grey skies and a stiff northeasterly which is bringing heavy showers. One of the advantages of Golspie is that there is a fair choice of walks so today's was into the relative shelter of the Dunrobin forestry.

Having fungi to search for at this time of year has been a welcome new interest, but recently they've become increasingly difficult to find. However, this pile of rotting logs beside Dunrobin Castle's walled garden came up with masses. 

The logs have been here so long that one has a sapling growing out of it. Each seems to host a single fungus, this one, which I have failed to identify, resembling....

....stacked potato crisps.

At one point the crisps had grown up a small branch of the log, the uppermost forming a flower.

Another log had a similar fungus except....

....it was less toasted and rather more rubbery. Yet another log....

....boasted this rather pretty fungus, the only one I have managed to identify. It's purple jellydisc, Ascocoryne sarcoides, I think.

Up in the woodland at the back of the walled garden I found this fungus, its cap being a slightly unusual shape. Again, I haven't yet identified it.

So a walk which, in prospect, might have been damp and slightly boring became a pleasure.

A Hard Frost

We had a hard frost last night, the air temperature -3.4C at 9 this morning, and struggling to get above zero by midday except in places touched by the sun. Here, a gorse has burst into flower at a very unseasonal time.

On such cold mornings, when puddles and bird baths are frozen, this one solidly to a depth of a centimetre, the birds are desperate for water. This is a siskin, a pretty little bird which, sadly, is a rare visitor to the garden although there are flocks of them in Dunrobin woods half a mile away.

Even when one takes out a jug of hot water it's only an hour or so until the surface once again freezes over, but it's well worth the effort for the number of birds attracted for a drink.

Dusk & Dawn

This was last night's sunset, seen in a view from our house which looks out across the town's graveyard and primary school, at four yesterday afternoon, and....

....this was sunrise this morning, the picture taken just after nine.

We have the first view from both our small snug, a room we retreat to on cold winter evenings, and, more extensively, from the sun room at the southwestern end of the house. The dawn view is only visible from indoors from the stair landing, which is where the picture was taken, though the sun also pours in through the frosted glass of the upstairs bathroom. That we don't really benefit at all from the morning sun is a quirk of the history of the house. When it was built there was a working garage and repair shop on the southeast side of the house - now it's the graveyard car park - so only three windows 'look' out that way, the landing, the upstairs bathroom and the downstairs toilet.

Aspect is such an important factor in a house, one which estate agents seem to ignore since, in our experience, very few plans of houses for sale have any indication of their orientation, such as a north-south sign. 

I have live in houses whose living areas faced the sunset but three times I have lived in houses which had views eastwards - the Hoey and third Cliff Avenue houses when I was a boy in Mombasa, and Matenderere - and they taught me that to be able to start each day by watching the dawn is one of life's great privileges.

A Rocky Story

Golspie beach, along with many other local beaches, is littered with lumps of exotic rock - in the sense that they didn't originate here. This is an example, a metamorphic rock called a gneiss. To my knowledge, the nearest outcrops of this sort of rock are to the west of us or in Norway, so the only way they can have been brought in is by the ice that covered the area some 10,000 years or more ago.

As the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice they left great piles of boulder-clay, that is, material that contained an unsorted mixture of everything from boulders to clay. The rivers that worked the land along the ice front then sorted this sediment, as rivers do, bringing many of the boulders down to the coast where the sea has been moving them around ever since. One of the characteristics of ice worn rocks is that they are angular, often having been ripped off the basement rock under the glacier as it passed. That these rocks are now relatively rounded is down to the action of waves and running water.

This is but the recent history of this rock, and a brief history at that. How the rock itself was formed is a much longer story, spanning many millions of years.