Country Diary: The Burren, Ireland

Stormy weather and there I was, surrounded by frills, flounces, fringes and furbelows. I was on Bishop's Quarter Beach amid piles of fresh, wet seaweed and shells, thrown up by the roiling, storm-driven waves of the previous day and night. I poked about with my stick, unravelling dead men's ropes or devil's shoelace (Chorda filum). Brown to olive-green bands, slightly ruffled, holed like a sieve of sea colander or devil's apron (Agarum cribrosum), stretched out on the sand. Irish moss, what we call "carragheen" with its delicate tendrils and fan tracery was everywhere. Carragheen pudding is regarded as delicious and healthy. A spray of carragheen was often dropped into a tot of whiskey as a cure for coughs. I am told New York Irish bar staff used to prescribe this.

I enjoyed myself among the fantasia of seaweed filament. I disturbed a willy wagtail, feeding on a hillock of seaweed. He erupted straight into the sky. I walked on, noting the many broken and whole shells, the blue luminescence of mussels, cones of cockles, fan-vaulting of scallops, limpets, the pearl-white interior of whelks. I found one empty, unbroken razor-shell, white with a faint mauve stripe. An American friend once described his search for razor clams. First on tip-toe (clams can hear footsteps) he looked for a tiny hole in the sand. Then he counted very slowly to 10, immediately striking deep down with shovel or pitch-fork near the hole, flinging up the largest possible lump of sand. If the attempt was unsuccessful there was no use trying again. Forewarned, the clam could never be budged Byron was right: "There is a society where none intrudes / By the deep Sea, and music in its roar."