Beachcombing

Moving around the town yesterday was lethal as the previous night's frost had followed a brief shower and had turned the pavements into skating rinks. We had a hard frost again last night but we were able to make our way along the front this morning to....

....the beach to the southwest of the town, where a nine o'clock low tide enabled us to get onto the sands for the first time in over a week, to find....

....that the upper beach, which the early morning high tide hadn't reached, was rimed with frost.

 It was wonderful to wander along the sands again with hardly a soul in sight, looking out for anything interesting that had been washed up, which included this rather fine jawbone.

This strange grooved track ran from the high-tide mark some twenty metres or so, almost down to the sea, but....

 ....the ray which had made it hadn't reached safety and had died out on the sands.

I'm no expert on British ray species but a search on the internet seemed to suggest it might have been a small-eyed ray, Raja microocellata.

The Seafront

This is the seafront at Golspie on a sunny almost-midwinter's morning, with Silver Rock rising behind it. The A9 trunk road, Main Street, runs fifty yards back from and parallel to the front, with the town strung along its length. Our little cottage is just on the other side of the A9 so, if the traffic allows, it's a two minute walk from our front door to the beach. It's not quite as good as living actually on the beach but I'm not complaining because....

....it's almost everything a beach should be, with some mostly plastic-free flotsam just above the high-tide line, a narrow storm beach of cobbles and then a wide sand beach exposed as the tide falls.

The sand is clean and firm underfoot and has a character of its own. These pustules seemed to have formed as the first waves of a rising tide lapped gently across it: when trodden upon, they burst. I have never seen anything like them and can't imagine how they form.

However, what I like most about the beach is the variety of birds which inhabit it. These are redshanks, but we've also seen oystercatchers, ringed plovers, curlews, grey herons, a couple of diver species, various ducks, several species of gull, jackdaws and rooks and, amongst the flotsam, pipits. Most of them are remarkably tolerant of humans though they do draw the line at the dog-walkers.

So it's a good beach to spend time on, and certainly a beach which I want to get to know intimately.

The Green-Keepers

Golspie's 18-hole links golf course lay brittle and frozen after the overnight frost, with nothing moving on it this morning except....

....some dog-walkers and....

 ....the resident green-keepers, a stonechat pair and....

....a lone and rather-guilty-looking robin.

Dunrobin Woodland Walk

We set off this morning to walk, for about the third time recently, northeast along the coast path that leads to Dunrobin Castle and Brora and, if one keeps going, John o' Groats, but at the edge of the town we met a small group of people coming down the path visible to the left of this picture. Talking to them, they suggested we could, for a change, follow the Dunrobin Woodland Walk path that they had just enjoyed. It leads up a steep slope, perhaps an ancient cliff line, to....

....open deciduous woodland, with silver birch dominant, and some very pleasant walking along the top of the 'cliff'.

At our age it's rather nice to come across the occasional bench, particularly one which is in the sun and has a view across the fields to the sea, but....

....what struck me most forcibly was, where we met this track which led down to two houses, a notice which said, 'Private, Please' - such a contrast in tone to the quite unpleasant notices to which we became accustomed on some of our Suffolk walks.

The path ended at Dunrobin Castle but there is a network of paths to be explored in this woodland, something we look forward to doing.

Winter Evening

At this time of year at Golspie's latitude, 58N, evening comes early - this picture was taken at three and the sun sets half an hour later. The small birds which are coming to our bird table and feeders in the back garden have already disappeared for the day, the last to feed being the dunnocks, while high above....

....skeins of geese are heading south to their overnight resting places after a day feeding in the fields to the north of us. This flight, one of half a dozen or more that passes back-and-forth each day, has some seventy individuals in it.

They're greylags, and we're told that the flocks will overwinter here as long as the weather doesn't become too bitter, in which case they'll move further south.

Meanwhile, down on the sands, a lone redshank feeds in the rising tide.

Spring Tides

The tides here today are at springs, with a fall of three metres between high and low. Walking along the sea wall this morning to the southwest of the town and looking out to sea, one wouldn't have known....

....how fierce the waves were once they approached the beach. For about a mile the coastal defences are constructed of masses of large rocks against which each sea smashed itself into a thousand fragments, but further on....

....they broke against what is now a shingle beach - much of the sand that covered it has long gone.

When we turned for home, walking along the path between the golf course and the beach, the sun was out and the sea seemed placid.

I'm a glutton for these beach walks so was back the same way in the late afternoon, with the tide falling quickly across a beach battered by the waves. I was privileged, first along the sands as the tide slid back, and in the course of an hour's gentle walk I met only one other person, a man walking his two Jack Russells.

A Straight Choice

We managed to get ourselves onto the electoral register for the Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross constituency in time to vote today, but it offered us a limited chance to vote tactically to influence the election outcome. The SNP won it in 2015 by some 4,000 votes from the Lib Dems, but the latter regained it in 2017 with a narrower majority of around 2,000. The Conservatives did far better in 2017 than in 2015, with a 16% swing which placed them only 2,000 behind the SNP, but it would take quite a significant further swing for them to win this time around.

So the choice for us, as confirmed remainers and with no Green candidate, lay between the Lib Dems, who want Scotland to stay in the UK and to retain the nuclear deterrent, and the SNP who don't. For the first time I found myself seriously considering the SNP.

None of which was of the slightest interest to one of the robins which come in to our back yard. His worry, like ours as we slithered our way to the Community Centre to vote, was the state of the weather.