A Sunday Sanna Walk

With the clouds down to ground level at times this morning so a ramble in the hills was off the agenda, we drove to Sanna and then walked the track to Sanna Bheag before going down to the bay below it, Port na Tuine on Bald's map of 1806, the Bay of the Waves.

Sanna is famous for its sands but how much sand is there, and where it's distributed, depends on recent weather. At the moment, the northern side of the bay is deeply eroded, and it was in this hollow....

....that we found the first by-the-wind sailors, a relative of the Portuguese man-o'-war. Rachael found them at Sanna in July - post here - in summer, when one would expect them, but there were plenty today scattered along a tide line half way between low and high, so they had only come in on one tide. The MarLIN website, here, gives more detail and states that winter strandings of large numbers is not unusual.

The beaches were all but deserted. In the two hours we were there we only saw two couples with their dogs. The weather looks bad but only occasional drifts of drizzle blew across and the wind was warm, the air temperature around 10C.

The only other occupants of the beaches were ringed plovers, a pair of great northern divers, plenty of gulls,...

....the remains of a seal, this photo courtesy Around & About, who found it earlier in the week, and....

....a small flock of sheep which was feeding on the kelp but, when disturbed, decided to cross the Sanna Burn to escape us.

Many thanks to Around & About for the photo.