THE SHELL SEEKERS

The shell seekers and castle builders 

Late August; To Scourie Beach we have made several trips.

Building sand castles and collecting periwinkles, top shells, limpets and mussel shells with lots of different seaweeds: twisted wrack and egg wracks and sea gull feathers and purple thistle heads collected from nearby.

On the headland just up from the beach

We’d bring them bring them all back to set them out on a table in the hotel’s back bar, and draw them, when rain prevented us from going outside.

Treasure Trove

One afternoon while Daisy and Millie collected small flounders, prawns and crabs Harry built an aquarium in the sand where they could live, until the tide came in.

In the bird hide, right on the beach, where several useful books for us to enjoy when getting out of the rain as it blew into shore; including the OBSERVERS BOOK OF THE SEA AND SEASHORE by I.O. Evans.

Mr Evans says in this essential volume first published in 1962

‘The sea and the seashore, from the depths of the abyss to the splash zone are inhabited by a wide variety of living creatures. They differ very greatly from those of the land, so great is this difference that the life of the sea is full of interest; nor is it lacking in beauty’.

In the Bird Hide an essential volume