Expedition 222 - 10th October 2009
The Arivegaig Shore

 

A almost perfect day for an expedition, a light breeze, no rain and a few sunny spells. This time we had five explorers, Calum, Fern, Robbie, Rowan and Zack, with Philippa, Richard L., Sam, Sheila, Sharon and Simon, as the adult helpers and Ellie and a Hungarian dog called Huzal doing a lot of running around.

I took a few pairs of binoculars in the expectation of seeing lots of birds and we saw two swans flying over before most of the explorers had even got out of the cars. We left the car park and set off along the beach, with our young explorers keen to test the efficiency of their wellies by wading out into the sea as far as they could. The only birds around were two gulls and two oystercatchers but then a flock of starlings showed up on Smudge’s field and we saw quite a few birds after that.

The first hazard was a stream which, in drier weather might have been no problem but recent rains had made it deep and boggy and Sharon detected a leak in one of her wellies. The rest of us made a very careful crossing except for Rowan who took several flying leaps across. At this point Calum discovered an old bottle and from then on all the explorers were scanning the ground for interesting finds. A skull was found which was defined by one explorer as being from a dragon – not everyone was convinced.

We continued round the shore and reached a promontory, which had a small cave and a good lookout point for seeing the whole bay. Several explorers used binoculars to look at oystercatchers, gulls and curlew and Calum spotted and identified Tracey’s house in the distance. As we left the hill we found the remains of an old wheelbarrow with a lot of cultivation ridges nearby, a long way from the nearest houses. Shortly after this we saw a group of geese take off and fly off towards Acharacle.

We carried on round the shore, looking at several bands of clay and eventually cut across the moss to the river. This had several large meanders and two places where the meanders had been cut off leaving low flat areas in the peat. As we followed the river upstream we saw a deer jump up and run off across the moss.

This was one of those rare occasions when I forgot to bring the Tunnock’s wafers, so we had to keep going. We stopped at the old road bridge for a photograph and then walked back down the road to the car park, getting back to the Blue Parrot quite early for a change.
Everyone turned out a good picture this time; I picked out Calum’s fine drawing of himself finding the bottle buried in the peat.

John Dye





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