Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2007 | Page 70
life
COUNTRYSIDE, WILDLIFE & FARMING
By Tony Ridd
[email protected]
Beach
Buddies
Thank goodness for the
typical British Summer,
bringing us back down
to earth after the hype
of climate change and
global warming, which
raised our hopes of
long sunny days and
hot, ’chest-baring’
temperatures.
Still, this shouldn’t put you off
enjoying our island beaches
which are ideal sites for playing,
exploring or just watching the
sun set, as it still does every
evening, albeit sometimes
behind a thick blanket of cloud!
What ever happened to good
70
Main Picture: Orange Tip
Below: Peacock
old fashioned family fun,
where you went down to the
beach to kick a ball round,
re-enacting last year's FA Cup
Final or re-writing the record
books with England retaining
the Ashes because of dad’s
excellent batting tally…
But it doesn’t have to be all
about sport, there are ample
opportunities for budding
David Attenborough’s to
discover wonderful new
creatures in an endless supply
of rock pools at low tides
around our island beaches.
Freshwater Bay is a good
first stop, with the added
opportunity to explore the caves
in the chalk cliffs. The rocks
are hard and this encourages
all sorts of shell fish, such as
limpets and winkles, which
when I was younger, we
used to collect, wash, cook
and then painstakingly pick
them out with pins and eat.
As beaches go this is a
pretty safe place at low tide
with lots of shallow rock pools
amassed with different types
of seaweed, anemones and
stuffed full of hungry crabs.
A little further down the coast
is the well known Hanover
Point (Brook) famous for its
fossilised tree trunks and
dinosaur footprints, still clearly
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