Small Sanna Treasures

We walked at Sanna yesterday intending, in a mixture of rain and sleet showers blown on by a searching wind, to exercise quickly on the Sanna beaches before returning home for a large bowl of home-made cabbage soup, but turned southwards instead, climbing to the two large cairns on the hills which run east-west between the Sanna Burn and the sea.

But, as so often happens, we strayed further, down to what we call the shelly beach, and found ourselves children again, hunting through the coarser shell debris for treasures hidden in the sand.

The beach faces eastwards, across a wide bay towards the Cat's Face, a cliff which ends in Rubha Carrach. Above it towers Rubha an Duin Bhain, a promontory crowned by what we've always taken to be a Viking fort - in our imaginations, the Norsemen pulled their longboats up onto this beach, and tilled the coarse soils at its back.

The beach sand here is in total contrast to those which run along the south side of the bay, which are formed of a hard sand ideal for beach cricket. This stuff is gritty, full of the shattered remains of sea urchins, mussels, limpets, whelks, cones and....

....these little treasures.

They're a cowrie, the European or Spotted Cowrie, Trivia monacha. It's common in west coast waters, but isn't easy to find as the adult is only a centimetre long. The younger forms lack the three spots of the adult shell. There's another, close relative which also inhabits northern waters, Trivia arctica, but the differences are so slight the two shells are almost indistinguishable.

The Diary has a particular affection for cowries. As children, living on the coast of East Africa, we used to search the reefs for slightly larger relatives, the money cowrie, which grew to about 1.5cm, and the exotic leopard or tiger cowrie, a giant of great beauty which sometimes exceeded 10cm.

A map of the area is here.