FROM SEA TO SEE

There are very few pleasures that can beat walking on a beach - whether it's summer and the soft sand between your toes is dazzling white, speckled with cowries and nuzzled by a warm turquoise sea - or in winter wrapped up like a Michelin man with the sea a maelstrom of fury and a wind that shreds your face leaving it to glow long after you've reached the safety of a blazing hearth and glass of Islay malt.

A distant horizon, the movement of waves, light shifting behind clouds, seaweed smells and the physicality of walking all combine like a perfect recipe to produce a Zen-like serenity. Almost like a musical score of the mind, bass lines beat with feet and waves while higher melodies appear and are improvised by twitching whiskers of glistening- eyed inquisitive seals or by the swept back plunging of a dozen gannets catching the sun and blazing. Arpeggios surface and are gone again with the coming and goings of sea-ducks - the synchronised tail flicks of the oh so elegant long tailed ducks in Feall bay or the iridescent flash of merganser crests on Crossapol.

These internal symphonies can fill and empty the mind while striding the waters edge, but head further up the beach, walk slowly at the high-tide line, forget the view of shimmering islands, look down and now the music becomes much more sophisticated and complicated, less like Mendelsson or Cafe del Mar, more string quartet with dramatic cellos. Here at the spring tideline the simplicity of the sea shows a different face. Here in the cast up tangles is an altered world, a view of creation through the deep oceans' looking glass. Superficially chaotic with coloured plastics, dismissed as rubbish, we find an Aladdin's lamp of possibilities and other lives. A message in a bottle; in the world of email how exciting it is to sift the bottles and
spy that scrap of paper. Recent ones come from the Norwegian fisherman off Greenland, several from Nova Scotia (one guy came all the way to see the beach for himself where his message arrived), the couple on the "Fun Ship Fantasy" off Florida, the Tiree girl looking for a pen-pal, a 100 franc note from the QE 2, a Spanish fisherman off Rockall and the constant and somewhat annoying messages from Northern Ireland to "repent for the day of judgement is nigh."

Bottles, cans shampoo, toothpaste, washing up liquid, vodka, Buzz lightyear, boxes of this, that and who knows what in languages as diverse as Japanese, Portuguese, Indonesian, Russian, Canadian, French all clamouring for attention while nested in bound up ropes and fragments of Caribbean pumice stone. The artist up for the Turner prize this year with her installation of thrown away pieces can never match the oceans' artistry along the tide-line.

For me the climax, those high singing notes of purity, come when a sea bean allows itself to be found. These beans have travelled thousands of miles from the American tropics. Big, burly and obvious are the coconuts but small and perfect are the molluca beans and horse-eyed beans. Several different types of these seeds are found and most come from vines or lianas, the kind Tarzan swings on. Their seeds drop into rivers and are carried to the sea. For some the journey is just starting as first the gulf stream then the North Atlantic current nudges them further on until years later intact and shiny there they sit. No wonder a vibrant folklore surrounds them. The Mary bean (tearna mhuire) first appears in the literature in 1693 and was venerated in the Outer Hebrides through an association with the Virgin Mary. Beans encased in silver were heirloom talismans, helping to " guard virtue" in young women and to relieve pain during child-birth. (I guess they don't work then!)

There is almost no limit as to what the sea provides, from the mighty sperm whale to the tiny delicate By-the-windsailors that graced Crossapol for a few brief days last summer. Vaguely related to the jellyfish By-the-wind-sailors are floating hydrozoans, a colony of small animals with stinging purple tentacles that sails endlessly round the great north Atlantic currents, propelled by the wind on its sticky-up gas-filled float cum sail. With them comes the most beautiful of predators, the equally small and delicate violet sea snail.

"I must down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky."

To find out more about the treasures on our shores there is the recently published "Sea beans and Nickar nuts. A handbook of exotic seeds and fruits stranded on beaches in north-western Europe." by E. Charles Nelson. ISBN 0-901158-29-1. CS.