Dodging the showers there's just time for a quick walk along the beach. Rather than following the oldest of the strand lines, where masses of whitened shells lie in tempting profusion, I head for the sea's edge. There are shells here, too, but it is the variety of the seaweed loosened by winds and low tides and now left behind by this afternoon's falling tide that slows my pace from march to amble. Scattered along the length of the sand like the cast-ashore remnants of a good garden tidy-up are long, bedraggled leaves of eelgrass. But though still green, their colouring is eclipsed by that of the delicate-looking sea lettuce. Soft and gleaming wet from the sea, even in this dull light it glows a far more vivid, translucent green.
In comparison, the brown seaweeds seem a more robust bunch. Coarse tangled stems of various wracks are rolled back and forth by the wavelets breaking on the shore, while long strands of chorda filum – which, as children, we descriptively, but erroneously, called thong weed – snake across the sand. Extremely slippery when wet, hard to get hold of, it slithers through the fingers like spaghetti from a fork. Its common names, the poetic sea lace and the rather more sinister dead man's rope, reveal a decidedly ambiguous interpretation of its character.
But the largest and toughest-looking of all the seaweeds on the beach today must be the sea belt. Some fronds have been left coiled around themselves by the sea; others stream out along the sand for a couple of metres like discarded banners. Deeply crumpled and dimpled, the tough leathery streamers are edged with a contrastingly frivolous wavy border. The sea belt has a second softer side, too – when dried, a sweetish white powder forms on the frond, explaining its alternative name of sugar kelp and its use as an edible seaweed.