Beach Sculpture

At the beach at Roanhead, just outside Barrow-in-Furness, yesterday, there was the lowest tide that I have ever seen there. At Roanhead, the estuary of the River Duddon - lovely river of my childhood, all clear waters and rocks and tiny fish and paddling and swimming - leaves the Lake District and reaches the sea.

But yesterday there was no discernible sea at all: just the distant river in the middle of a huge expanse of sand.

In the sand were patterns left by the departing tide:

That was quite interesting - little bobbly heaps of sand: they didn't look quite like worm casts but maybe that's what they were, or used to be.

And then there were some patterns that were very obviously made by waves:

And then there was this, which had no doubt been constructed by a large number of Beach Elves with buckets and spades, working hard throughout the night under very precise instructions:

John was telling me today that there is lots of this kind of thing in the desert, made by Desert Elves, I expect: and unless you drive over it at the correct speed then all the screws in your vehicle will come undone. In fact they probably will anyway.

I'm generally keen on man-made beach sculpture of the ephemeral kind, such as those to be found on the World Beach Project (search for Sandsend, which is in North Yorkshire, near Whitby, to find John and Katrin's sculptures). But I thought this Elf-made sculpture was fantastic.