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 Island Life - www.islandlife.tv