Post #438995 by atomictonytiki on Tue, Mar 10, 2009 5:23 AM

As long as I can remember I always wanted to be a Beachcomber, this is my favorite place to beachcomb its the two mile of beach that surrounds my parents hill in Orkney. I went this walk last year on an unseasonably sunny two hours of daylight last winter.

looking back towards my parents house, around that beach head, over that mounds of seaweed, a hundred years ago all that seaweed would have been an important cash crop for an Orcadian crofter.

In the background you can see the hills of Hoy, malt drinkers might recognize them from the packaging of Highland Park Whisky.

This is the "Point of Ayre" where two currents meet and throw up loads of drift and plastic crap. The tower in the picture is a WW2 searchlight emplacement.

Is it a sea-monster? No its a rotting seal, the salmon farmers are allowed to kill seals that are "troubling" their farms, so they shoot them and let them float off to rot.

The white bit with rusting rings attached is the remainder of the anchor point to a massive metal anti-submarine net that protected the royal navy anchorage during WW2.

This is the second searchlight.

Notice where the steps meets the side of the searchlight wall, you can see a black square, that's the famous "Hole-in-the-head" a cave where the men of my family hid from pressgangs way back in the past.

That's the third searchlight and it marks the outer boundary of our land..

..it has a really cool bridge joining it to the hill..

..and the beach beside it is another place the gathers drift, some wood and floats. When I lived at home I was expected by my father to bring them all home, so he could reuse them on his creels.

A bit further along, if you look closely you can see more bouys and my parents dog.

In the far distance you can see some cottages and that was the extent of how far I'd beachcomb every night after school as a teenager. This is another good beach for drift, I've found ancient glass bouys, weather balloons instrument pods, bales of rubber, intact giant light bulbs and wood from sunken ships on this beach.