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Author Archives: solwayshorewalker
Snippet 15: The continuing mystery of the piddocks
The tide is ebbing and, along the inner edge of a shallow channel on the shore, it has deposited a line of offerings, neatly sorted: predominantly mussel shells, some black, some striped, all shining wetly in the October sun; a … Continue reading
Posted in Allonby, Found Objects, sea-bed & undersea, shells, Snippets, submerged forest
Tagged Pholas, piddocks, Zirfaea
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The fog and the froth
Diffuse, pale light glimmers and shifts with the fog above Skinburness saltmarsh. Two crows call harshly and fly swiftly towards a broad-winged shape, a buzzard, who slants his wings and flaps away, fading and disappearing into the whiteness. Along the … Continue reading
Posted in mud-shrimps, mudflats, saltmarshes
Tagged Fog, saltmarsh, samphire
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Snippet 14: Long-lost piddocks and the peat
The shore at Beckfoot, on a sunny, windy day in May: the Solway is a churned, pale brown, and a wavering white line far off in the Firth marks where the incoming tide is beating against a sandbank. Towards the … Continue reading
Posted in mud-shrimps, peat, bogs and moors, sea-bed & undersea, Snippets, submerged forest
Tagged molluscs, piddocks
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Fish traps on the Mawbray shore
It is a low spring tide, chosen especially because it allows us to scan a vast area of the shore. Above Mawbray Banks, pilot Andrew Lysser turns the gyroplane in a circle, its rotors buzzing and clattering, and I lean … Continue reading
Posted in aerial views, archaeology, fishing, stones
Tagged Beauly Firth, fish traps, Mawbray, Severn, Strangford Lough, weirs, yairs
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The saltpans at Crosscanonby
The tides and currents have sorted the sizes and colours of the shingle, and here on the upper shore near Crosscanonby I am walking over shapes that are large – and predominantly red: lumps and discs of the New Red … Continue reading
Posted in aerial views, Allonby, coastal heritage, salt
Tagged Crosscanonby, kinch, saltpans, wooden pipe
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Ice
In January and February this year, people living at Bowness and along the Upper Solway started posting photos of tidelines – not of drifts of hornwrack, kelp and driftwood, but of ice and snow. As the freezing weather continued, so … Continue reading
Posted in ice
Tagged art and science, ice-floes, razorshells, Solway viaduct, Wampool
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Climbing on the Solway’s sea-cliffs: guest post by Judith Brown and Dog Holden
Godfrey ‘Dog’ Holden and Judith Brown have been friends for years, climbing together extensively during the 1990s and early 2000s. Here they look back on discovering those early delights of climbing on the Solway sea-cliffs in Dumfries & Galloway. On … Continue reading
Posted in Guest Posts
Tagged cliffs, climbing, Galloway
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‘Cold cases’: land-scape puzzles on the Solway shore
“Mr Cash went to Beckfoot … the submerged forest was not visible and I regret to say the residents he inquired from had not even heard of it”. So wrote Brian Blake in his 1955 book The Solway Firth, which … Continue reading
Posted in Allonby, dunes, peat, peat, bogs and moors, sea-bed & undersea, submerged forest
Tagged peat, piddocks, submerged forest
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The vanishing keel on Ship’s-keel Scaur
Back in 2015 near Dubmill Point on Allonby Bay I finally found what I’d been searching for: the ‘ship’s keel’ for which Ship’s-Keel Scaur is named. Its timbers were as hard as iron, the keel (if that is what it … Continue reading
Posted in Allonby, coastal heritage, industrial archaeology, ships
Tagged shifting sand, shipwrecks
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Bores on the Solway
The tidal bore on the Solway approached “… with a hoarse and loud roar, and with a brilliance of phenomena and demonstration, incomparably more sublime than if the wide sandy water were densely scoured with the fleetest and the most … Continue reading
Posted in crossings & waths, Spring & Neap Tides, tidal bores
Tagged kayaking, River Eden, River Nith, River Wampool, tidal surge
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Solway Shore-walker 