Tornamona Beach

Dawn this morning saw the day start exactly as it intended to continue, cloudy, slightly hazy, dry, and with a promise of sunshine that never really materialised.

We set off for the area to the south of Tornamona, the cleared clachan just to the west of Camas nan Geall, and on our way stopped to watch a stag stag which stopped a late breakfast to watch us.

We parked the car where the road crosses the Allt Torr na Moine, and walked southwards along the face of the hill called Torr na Moine until....

....we stood overlooking Camas nan Geall. All along this ridge lie the ruins of small houses, part of the extended settlement of the clachan of Torr na Moine.

The beach below the ben is one that collects rubbish, much of it the usual horrible plastic waste, but it also includes plenty of wood, making this an ideal beach for a proper beach barbecue.

A couple of days ago I said that shelduck aren't to be seen in Kilchoan Bay like they used to be. Well, they've moved to the beach below Torr na Moine.

We walked westwards almost the length of the beach, stopping, as we always seem to do, to sit on the doorstep of one of the two buildings on the beach below Bourblaige. I don't know whether these were people's homes or whether they were built as stores for Bourblaige's fishing gear, but we always think of the people, long gone, who used to sit here.

By coincidence, a gentleman wrote to me today from Australia: his ancestors lived in Bourblaige before emigrating to Australia.

Climbing the hill on our way back to the car we found this common lizard, one of the greener variety, lying in the grass trying to warm up.

This picture looks back across the Bourblaige's fields to the beach and Maclean's Nose and, in the distance, Mull, while....

....this one looks back the way we had come, eastwards towards Camas nan Geall, Ardslignish and Loch Sunart.

Beside the burn that runs through Bourblaige we checked the badger's midden we found last summer, a neat deposit in the middle of a well-worn path. Earlier in the winter there was no sign of its use, but today we found fresh faeces. Ardnamurchan badgers tend to be nomadic, so this particular group are back from their winter holidays.

Satellite photo courtesy Bing Maps.