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It is low tide, perhaps approaching turn. A light wind from the south-west Beaufort 2 at the most. In the anchorage, water seems calm, almost, though one knows examination would discover movement. Three birds squabble about something one has found in wet sand. Turnstones, perhaps. Possibly plovers. The world from here on is being stripped to bare stones, soaked twice and much of the day; the bleached white; and the brown or golden, like corms out of soil. These types intermix; the first two tangled in weed. Orange lichen thrives intermittently. Ghosts of former land show themselves off well. Burnt Island. The predatory solitary rocks part submerged would once have been low hills when sea was lower. Bits stand ungainly where they shall soon be pushed to fall, breaking possibly, soaked and dried, heated and cooled, becoming sand in centuries. And it is so It makes us. A sparrow sand-bathes energetically in bare looseness left by a path worn through a falling hedge. Herring gulls eat close to the rough shore line and then back away shaking their heads in sets of shaking, over and over. A black-backed gull preens itself in blue water. And small birds wait upon walls in sight of yellowed grass where, until recently, there was a tent. The rain in the last hour may bring up much that can be eaten. A song thrush jazzes the afternoon from a low roof. Behind, in the field hedges and a small woods, great complexity of song. Ahead, growing sounds as wind and tidal flow begin to rise. The sun is at its height and must soon fall, all its heat declining. Two birds hard to identify against the solar flare acrobat in what may well presage reproductive attachment.