Sandside Bay

Sandside is an interesting little place on the north coast of Scotland. It has a pretty beach, which is obviously popular with surfers (there were around six people in the waves the day we visited). Yet it is near Dounreay, the nuclear power station, which you can see in the background of the photo above. (You can also make out a windfarm, obviously a cleaner, greener form of energy, but even wind turbines have their problems as I briefly discussed in the latter part of this post).The sign in the photo warns against picking anything from the beach, due to the likelihood of it being radioactive. But no warnings against surfing.....

The geology of this bay is beautiful

and there's a picturesque harbour at the end of a wee path

Not sure I'd want to eat the lobsters caught in these lobster pots, (even if I liked shellfish in the first place!)

We were fascinated to find several song thrush anvils on the path. Song thrushes are the only bird in the UK that can smash a snail from its shell and it usually does this on a favourite anvil stone. I have never before seen so many anvil stones in one place and we wondered whether it was one very busy song thrush or whether there was a whole colony of song thrushes each with its own anvil in it's favoured part of the path. We didn't see any song thrushes on our walk but here's the remains of a few snails around an anvil stone

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Obviously I wouldn't have picked sea glass or sea pottery from Sandside beach, but we saw almost no sea pottery or glass on any of the beaches on our trip. However, I've been updating the beach finds section of the Crafty Green Poet Etsy shop and will be adding more in the near future.