Three more for Johnny’s best beaches

Three of my favourites.   Two are opposite ends of Rhossili Bay on the Gower in quite different conditions and times of year.

The other one is Camusdarach Beach, up the coast from Arisaig, Scotland.

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Traditional view of Rhossili taken from just past Worm’s Head Hotel.  Early summer.

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The northern end of Rhossili Bay – Llangennith.  A windy day in March with the sand whipping up and stinging your face. Fabulous walking. Exciting windsurfing!

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Camusdarach near Arisaig – the beach where they built and filmed Ben’s shack  for  Local Hero, one of my favourite films.

Taken on a June evening in the gloamin’ about an hour after sunset.   We watched arctic terns fishing, taking turns to plummet vertically into the sea as the sky turned violet.

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Author: janh1

Part-time hedonist.

33 thoughts on “Three more for Johnny’s best beaches”

  1. Ok, if you’re going to count Rhossili as one beach, which it is, my third choice is Marloes in Pembrokeshire. Vast, wild and mostly empty. But I haven’t got a pic.

  2. janh, beautiful beaches and lovely photos. Perhaps soutie or Boa can tell us how to add images to comments?

  4. jan, I’ve worked it out! Go to “Add new post” as you would normally do. Insert the image into the new post, again as you normally do. Then click on the “HTML” tab and copy the HTML code. Then paste the code into the comment box in the post you want to add the image to. Then close the new post, without bothering to save it.

    Here’s a Google image of Marloes Sands:

  5. Woo thanks! I think that shot is from the path where you walk down to the beach – it’s actually a vast sweep of bay – blowing a gale last time I was there.

    Deep breath… testing, testing.

  6. Sandwood Bay is one of Britain’s most remote and unspoilt beaches. An eight mile round trip on foot from the nearest road deters all but the keenest beachgoers. I flew over from Kinloss which proved rather simpler!
    Here’s a potted history:
    Sandwood Bay is a natural bay on the far north-west coast of Scotland. It is best known for its mile-long beach and Am Buachaille, a sea stack, and lies about 5 miles south of Cape Wrath. Behind the bay’s large dunes, stretches Sandwood Loch – a freshwater loch full of brown and sea trout.

    Though remote, and with no road access, the bay is easily reached by a 4-mile long, yet well-trodden and fairly flat, path leading from the gravel car park at the hamlet of Blairmore. Sandwood Bay is part of the Sandwood Estate which is run by the John Muir Trust.

    Because of its isolation, the bay has become distinctly romanticised with several legends accorded to it. One legend tells of a mermaid spotted on one of the two jutting rocks there a hundred years ago. Alexander Gunn, a local farmer, was on the beach, searching for one of his sheep, when his dog made a startling discovery. One man, MacDonald Robertson, often spoke of the time he met Mr Gunn in 1939. This is what he reported: “On 5th January 1900 … Gunn’s Collie suddenly let out a howl and cringed in terror at his feet. On a ledge, above the tide, a figure was reclining on the rock face. At first he thought it was a seal, then he saw the hair was reddish-yellow, the eyes greenish-blue and the body yellowish and about 7ft long. To the day Alexander Gunn died in 1944, his story never changed and he maintained that he had seen a mermaid of ravishing beauty” [1].

    Another legend tells of the ghost of a sailor that would often knock on the windows of the old cottage (now a disused bothy) on stormy nights – apparently the victim of a shipwreck there. Indeed, before the Cape Wrath lighthouse was built in 1828, the bay is said to have played host to many a shipwreck – all of which still lie buried under the sand! In the 1920s, author Seton Gordon witnessed many submerged wrecks in the sand while walking here. In a book he wrote in 1935, “Highways & Byways In The West Highlands”, he says: “I was astonished at the number of wrecks which lie on the fine sand of this bay. All of them are old tragedies: since the placing of a lighthouse on Cape Wrath just over a hundred years ago, no vessel has been lost here. Some of the vessels lie almost buried in the sand far above the reach of the highest tide”. He also commented on the possibility of there being Viking longboats hidden there, since Sandwood Bay had in fact been used by the Vikings as a stopover point a thousand years previous. In fact, the name Sandwood Bay derives from the Viking name ‘Sandvatn’ (“sandwater”) given the bay all those centuries ago

  7. janh – your photo is absolutely stunning! Wow! I love the colours and the framing.

    coldwaterjohn – great background info. Here’s a Google image of Sandwood Bay (without the ghost!):

  8. Boa,

    Just a thought, can’t these beautiful pic’s of beaches be included in Johnny’s original post? Why start another?

  9. I didn’t land to get a ground shot like this – several months later a microlight tried to, and got so bogged down it couldn’t take off again. It had to be dismantled and carried out in pieces, four miles to the nearest road…this shot shows more clearly Am Buachaille (The Shepherd) guarding the southern flank of the bay – it looked like a needle in my aerial shot.

  11. Tocino

    They could… but I am loathe to interfere with a complete post and lose the comments!

  12. By the way, would someone more knowledgeable tell me what I have done wrong that my pic of Sandwood Bay shows only as a link in my comment, and not as the image itself?

  13. CWJ

    You need to put an opening angled bracket then img src=” before the http link.

    Then at the end of the link you write another ” and a close angle bracket.

    I can’t write it out in full – because wordpress thinks I’m telling it to do something 🙂

  14. CWJ

    Read Johnny’s comment #4

    (It’s now showing the pic so I can’t see your original html :()

  15. Soutie

    That’s ‘cos I’ve just changed it!

    Thought so, wasn’t sure if it was you or Johnny! I knew it wasn’t me 😉
    S

  16. Thank you for your intervention/explanation – we’ll get there eventually!
    Here’s another remote beach for you – Primrose Bay on the Moray Coast – dinosaur bones have been found in the sandstone quarries adjoining it…

    Link fixed S

  18. Hello everyone,

    Brilliant photographs all round; very pleasing on the eye. Recently, I obtained my first camera and fancy taking some photos of my own, there’s a lot of strange sights round my way. Smugly, I think I know how to insert photos in comments but I have another question to ask.
    How does one (good Royalist word) place the little copyright and name in the picture as Jan has done with her’s?

  19. Bugrit! How do I delete comments where my attempts to insert image fail?!

    Theroyalist: How to insert text and copyright: Within Picasa (free software- excellent for arranging images on your p.c.) just choose the text tool in the menu on the lefthand side, type what you want, and then move and size it to wherever on the image you want it to appear. Within Photoshop, there is a similar text tool, which is rather more comprehensive, and allows font choice in addition…

  21. CWJ – try experimenting on one of your own blogs first of all – you can delete any comment you like on your own blog! This is what I did whilst trying to work out how to do it!

    Have a go at my instructions in comment #4 above. I hope this helps.

  22. coldwaterjohn :

    Bugrit! How do I delete comments where my attempts to insert image fail?!

    Simple answer – you can’t!

    I don’t know what is wrong with your code on #16 – it looks fine – it may be that you have to sign into your site.

  24. I’m glad to see janh has posted pictures of the ‘crowded’ beaches of West Wales.
    (Two people constituting a crowd!)
    Beaches of that quality are too numerous to mention in Pembrokeshire and mostly dog friendly too, I miss them rather badly.

  25. Boa if you have the technical ability to move these to Johnny’s blog, please do. I only posted separately because I didn’t know how to include a pic in a comment.

    Just have to say it’s very good to see CWJ posting. That image is just *awesome*!!! My kind of beach.

    Been to Cape Wrath and definitely would have found this if we’d only known about it, drat.
    Wonderful tales – the washed up mermaid and the possibility of viking longboats buried in the sands. 🙂

    Amazing light in that image of Primrose Bay, but then the north of Scotland is very special. Spent a night on the causeway at the Kyle of Tongue and woke at 3am to find the sky entirely lilac and pink in advance of the rising sun with distant purple mountains.

  26. Hi Christina – I was hoping you’d see them. I expect you’ve walked Marloes a few times. Those wild beaches are a dog’s dream.

  27. Jan, why don’t you simply add your pics as comments on Johnny’s post?

    I of course could do it for you but then what? Delete this post with CWJ’s (and others) input. The problem is that once a post is published and goes ‘live’ it takes on a life of it’s own. I prefer to leave theses type of decisions to the author (you)

  28. Wow and wow again, there are some stunning beaches here, I don’t envy you Johnny, your task is going to be a difficult one. Each and everyone has taken some excellent images here, well done one and all. I’ll just browse again, they are so lovely.

  29. Val, I will score both the beaches and the photos, so keep them coming please…

  30. Hi Soutie. Yup, will do. They are probably still in the photo archive here anyway. Got to dash now. Back later.

  31. Royalist and CWJ, the software with my Canon enables me to embed my name in the histology of all my images, it can’t be seen on the image, but if anyone should pinch it from the Internet, they can’t claim it as there’s, it can’t be removed by anyone but you, the owner. It’s always a good idea to pop you your name on an image, although a thief can always crop the name off. I have now started putting text on images, ‘ Owners name embedded’ deters thieves, they cannot be sure it isn’t. You’d be amazed how many images are pinched from sites. Although I suppose you could take the view that if it’s pinched, it must be good 🙂

  32. Valzone, if anyone is seriously concerned about breach of copyright, the route to go is digital embedding – Digimarc is one of the leaders in the field:
    https://www.digimarc.com/solutions/dwm.asp
    Of course this won’t prevent someone taking a PrintScreen image off the Web but the quality and resolution would be rubbishy compared to any high resolution original image that had been digimarked.
    In my own experience I am pleasantly surprised how often people do in fact ask if they may use an image – if it is for something they will make money out of, I request a donation cheque made payable to Cancer Research or some other charity to be sent to me…

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