Sunday Morning Walk and beach clean at Dunnet Beach in the North of Scotland

My wife and I went for a nice long walk at Dunnet Beach in the North of Scotland. We'd driven up this weekend to see my dad, and went out for the walk this morning.

Dunnet Beach is around 3 miles long. Its quite large with a shallow sloping beach, and dunes on the landward side.

We often go there when in the north because we love the beach so much, it was quite grey and wet when we started out today, but the sun soon came out and it brightened up.

The beach is quite stunning and was quite quiet today - we maybe saw around 12 other people on the whole 2 hour walk - fairly empty, considering its size.

There were a lot of jelly fish washed up on the shore today, but they were mostly quite small, as can be seen above. The one above is a lion's mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata), and it will sting. You can tell them easily because of their dark brown colour.

Here is another one close-up - quite pretty.

Above is another. We call this moon jellies (Aurelia aurita). There were lots more of these, but they were really small (~3-4 inches across) - and these dont sting.

There was also a lot of dead seabirds on the shore. We easily saw around 50 today, which is not normal at all. It included a range of different types including a number of large ganets, which I've rarely seen here. I'll report this as it was quite strange to see so many dead - what a shame.

Although there was a good number of live birds, as always right in the surf, which we always see when we are there.

When visiting this beach, we always take a bag along with us, and clean up any rubbish we find. Today we found mostly discarded fishing rope, and odd pieces of plastic. We filled the bag right up, which we were pretty happy about, and also found a big coil of rope that we also took and disposed. However, I'm happy to say that there was not as much rubbish washed up on the beach as we'd normally find - which is good. Surprisingly, we also found a lot of used shot gun cartridge's - all different types, which was a little weird. I dont think the birds and the cartridges are connected, as the cartridges had clearly been in the sea for a long time.

Well we certainly enjoyed our walked, and were glad that we got to pick up quite a lot of rubbish. Its a shame about the birds though - quite a mystery.