The Ormaigmore beach, to the east of the slipway by the Ferry Stores, shows some of the results of the weeks of stormy weather. It's piled with seaweed, pushed there by yesterday's gale and high tide. Here, at least, the seaweed does no harm - in fact, some of it has been used for people's gardens, including ours. It's fairly clean too, in the sense that it doesn't contain too much of the usual plastic, rope and other flotsam that tends to get washed up. By contrast, the weed pushed ashore in other places has caused some real problems. For example, at Port Maggie, Portuairk, huge amounts of weed are blocking the mouth of a small burn, causing it to back up and become almost impossible to cross.
Because the beach opens out onto the mudflats of Kilchoan Bay it has a slightly different selection of seashells from beaches elsewhere, such as at Sanna. It's the best place to collect scallop shells, and for those who love wandering a beach and seeing how many different species of shell one can find, this is also a good place for cockles and razor shells. Again, the storms have produced a wonderful selection.
The beach ends at the mouth of the Millburn, seen brim-full in the foreground as it meets this morning's high tide. A small gaggle of the resident greylag geese had been feeding just above the high tide line on the Kilchoan side, and tolerated my approach until I was fifty metres away, when they flew off.
On the other side of Kilchoan Bay is more evidence of the storms, a kayak which had been left by the top of the slipway at the beginning of the winter.
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