Introduction
The JMT property of Quinag has about 2km of sea coast along its northern boundary on Loch a’ Chairn Bhain, with a further 1km around Eilean a’ Ghamhna. This maritime element of its landscape has featured in two previous articles (Quinag-by-the-Sea, 7th July 2018 and Exploring Quinag: Poll a’ Ghamhna, 20th July 2023).
We had never taken a good look at the beach at the mouth of two small burns east of Torr a’ Ghamhna (map, photo 1; NC216328). However, we were able to do so on September 29th 2024, on our way to the seaward end of the Allt Creag an Spardain gorge (which will be the subject of another article).
This visit was rather later in the year than before, and the dominant components of the vegetation, bracken and purple moor-grass, were at their densest, an unholy partnership in places. The reduction in deer numbers has also allowed the healthy regeneration of downy birch (photo 2), so we had to fight our way through to the beach (photo 3), and it was a relief to reach the shore.
Shoreline vegetation
The beach itself is stony, with little or no sand, perhaps the result of the sorting, on the shoreline, of the glacial drift that underlies much of the area just inland. Its landward edge supports rather sparse maritime vegetation, composed of higher plants that can tolerate inundation by the sea, a stony sort of saltmarsh (photo 4).
Conspicuous were yellowing stems of sea milkwort, with their neat rows of leaves (photos 5-6). Amongst them sprawled rosettes of creeping bent (photo 7) and taller wispy stems of saltmarsh rush Juncus gerardi (photo 8). Also present were cushions of thrift or sea pink and less compact rosettes of sea arrowgrass and sea plantain.
Maritime vegetation that has developed on substrates as stony as this appears to be unusual. However, the recent work on British Plant Communities (edited by J.S.Rodwell et al., volume 5, 2000) does describe a community called Juncetum gerardi saltmarsh (SM16), which occurs on a variety of substrates subjected to 150-200 submergences each year, and the species mix fits.
Wracks
Further down the shore, also on a stony substrate, but with bedrock outcropping in places, marine vegetation holds sway, defined as that occurring ‘below the level reached by high water of neap tides’.
Dominating these intertidal stretches are wracks (photo 9), medium-sized brown algae, which are well displayed on this beach. Highest on the shore was channel wrack Pelvetia canaliculata (photo 10), whose specific name relates to its narrow, evenly-forked, inrolled fronds. Its fruiting bodies are knobbly and rather more orange than the fronds themselves.
Just below the channel wrack appeared the typically twisted fronds of spiral wrack Fucus spiralis (photo 11), also with knobbly fruiting bodies which, on close inspection, prove to have distinctive marginal rims. This wrack does not have true bladders as such, but the fronds do sometimes have ’sausage-shaped swellings’, as does horned wrack (see below).
A little further down the shore, egg wrack or knotted wrack Ascophyllum nodosum took over (photo 12). Its specific name relates to the very large, elongated, single bladders ranged along its main axes and branches, which buoy up the long fronds when submerged. This was the wrack favoured by the seaweed harvesters who operated along the Assynt coast in the 1970s. Its fronds are frequently clothed, as here, with the much darker fine fronds of the epiphytic red alga wrack siphon weed Polysiphonia lanosa (photo 13).
More wracks
Intermixed with the egg wrack was the very familiar bladder wrack Fucus vesiculosus, with much smaller, paired, circular air bladders (photo 14). There was also a small amount of serrated wrack Fucus serratus, with toothed fronds, the lowest of this group found on the shore.
As has been mentioned, two burns cross the foreshore and, in the diluted seawater along their braided courses, we found a less familiar brown alga, horned wrack or estuary wrack Fucus ceranoides (photo 15). It gets one of its common names from the forked, pointed, ends to the fronds, which have conspicuous elongated air pockets running along their length. It occurs around the coast of Assynt in places where, even at high tide, there is reduced salinity.
Below the wracks, we might have expected to see the even larger brown algae known as kelps, but they were not visible on this visit. Either the tide was not low enough, or the shore may drop off very steeply at this point.
Rocks and their animal life
Large rounded boulders scattered through the wrack, and outcrops of bedrock, had been colonised by barnacles, both mature examples and recent spat (photo 16). Several kinds are found on rocky shores, but the ‘kite shape’ of the aperture, the form of the suture between its valves, and the disposition of the six surrounding plates showed these to be the northern rock barnacle Semibalanus balanoides, one of the commoner species locally. The plates of older examples were pitted (photo 17); these pits house endolithic lichens, probably Collemopsidium foveolatum, one of several related species occurring in this very specific micro-habitat.
Elsewhere on the beach, often in sheltered crevices, we noted a few of the commoner seashore molluscs, including common limpet Patella vulgata and common periwinkle Littorina littorea. Three relatives of the latter were also present, the smaller, more pointed, rough periwinkle L. saxatilis higher on the outcrops and the brightly-coloured, rounded, flat periwinkles L. fabalis and L obtusata amongst the wrack.
Ranging over more open rocky faces were numerous white dog whelks Nucella lapillus (photos 18-19), which feed on barnacles. They have an extrudable proboscis ending in a narrow tongue armed with very sharp teeth. They insert this between the valves of the aperture to rasp out the tissues of its prey. The dark apertures of some barnacles marked those that had already been predated.
Above the tide line
At the eastern edge of the beach, more continuous areas of bedrock above high tide level were covered with the usual white, grey and orange maritime lichens and, amongst them, in crevices, small cushions of one of very few salt-tolerant mosses Schistidium maritimum (photo 20).
These outcrops of bedrock were clothed in places with the wiry stems of a salt-tolerant shrub, crowberry (photo 21), whose older leaves were beginning to turn reddish-brown. This species occurs from the seashore to the tops of nearby hills, usually in places less exposed to fire in the past, on rocky crags and the tops of peaty tumps. A coarse fabric made from its stems, dating back to the Iron Age, was discovered during the excavation of the Clachtoll broch.
What we have described is not out of the ordinary for the Assynt coastline, but this habitat is scarce on the JMT property of Quinag, and a good example of its kind, so worth recording. With more time to explore, and a lower tide, we would probably have been able to add more intertidal species to this preliminary list.
Ian M. Evans and Gwen Richards