As we walked along the rocky shore towards the end of Ormsaigbeg this afternoon, the sun came out. With hardly a breath of wind, the sea was almost flat calm, and it felt as if one could step out onto its surface and walk across the Sound to Tobermory.
With the tide low, this coast is a mass of rock pools filled with a wonderful assortment of life. There's one particular pool which always has three or four sea urchins sitting in it. Since the bottom is rather bare, they camouflage themselves, very unsuccessfully, with bits of weed and pieces of broken shell.
Other animals which camouflage themselves include tiny shrimps and this little fish, perhaps a small gurnard.
The idea of walking across a sea isn't so far-fetched. In the rocks across which we trod lie the fossil remains of the animals of an ancient ocean. These are belemnites, a relative of the present-day cuttlefish, which swam around Ormsaigbeg over a hundred million years ago.
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