Wildlife and flowers in the dunes

Thank you so much Clue. The wild desolation comes over so well in your pictures. Not the "in your face " flora that we normally put up on GC but still most interesting. The wildlife that inhabits those dunes have it all to themselves - so fortunate.
I like your childhood recall of the lake. I doubt many parents would want their children to visit that spot now but they are part of one's childhood. We all have a few of those stored deep in the back of our minds.
Yes, the little yellow flower is toadflax and I recognise a few others but cannot name them without going to my Reference book.
It was a lovely experience to go to the dunes with you today. Wild and windy no doubt.
Jenny

 

I forgot to mention, I saw tonnes of creatures too. A few frogs, loads of bees, but loads and loads of butterflies, dragon flies and damselflies. None would keep still long enough for me to photo them. At one point I had to watch where I was stepping because with every step the air filled with butterflies.

 

That was an interesting walk Clueless. It's amazing how nature restores itself, albeit slowly and good to see such a variety of plants.

 

SLAG !!!!!!!!!

 

Brilliant set Clue, hope you don't mind me messing with it.

Smashing to see how the plants adapt and change to the hostile environment

 

Mess away at your leisure Zigs

I forgot to mention earlier (or maybe I did, can't remember now) a couple of points.

Try to imagine an invisible line slicing the dunes in two, with the line running between the beach and the works. The ground on each side of the line has a very different make up to the other. On the works side of the line is the original, natural coast. Marsh land that was reclaimed and the works built on it. Before environmental laws, the waste from the works was just dumped on the beach/dunes. That's the side I was on today, basically slag heaps punctuated with mostly drained marsh. The other side of that imaginary line, where the slag heaps and the original coast line end, is now the dunes. Presumably the sand washed/blew up against the slag heaps/reclaimed marsh and accumulated to form the dunes.

When we think about geographic features forming, we normally think in terms of thousands or millions of years. Not the case with coastal activity, where the shape of the coast can change significantly in just a few years, especially if some determined people start dumping rocks and then slag on the ground thousands of tonnes at a time. In fact the dunes are a different shape now to when I was little. When I was little, the shape of the dunes used to change almost perceptibly over a matter of weeks, but plants have moved in and started to bind the ground so the rate of change is slowing now. That said, there's just been a perceptible change in the last year at the seaward edge of the dunes. The official line is that it was sea level rise, but the sea hasn't noticeably risen 3 miles down at the Zetland end of town, and a very noticeable change coincided with the construction of the wind farm. There's one channel that's mysteriously formed where at high tide, for the first time in my lifetime, the sea actually penetrates into the dunes now.

The slag heaps side of that imaginary line has also changed significantly in my lifetime. Not least because the former British Steel is no longer allowed to pump millions of gallons of what I presume would be sulphuric acid (sulphur that's reacted with water) straight onto the dunes any more. Some of the ponds have gone completely. Some are now just marshy now. In one of the pics above, you can see flowers growing out of what used to be the bottom of a lake I used to take inflatable dinghies in when I was a kid. The flora has changed a bit too. Some plants have gone, others have appeared, and areas that I remember as barren are now decked out in vegetation. It used to be rumoured that tropical plants grew on there, because the steaming hot water from the outlet of the cooling systems ran through a leaky pipe under one of the slag heaps on its way out to sea, and kept the ground permanently warm even in winter. Plants grew there that nobody seemed to recognise so it was concluded that they were tropical ones. Quite how they would have got there is beyond me, but it was a good rumour.

 

That was brilliant, thanks Clueless.

Frank Herbert got his inspiration for 'Dune' from watching the moving sands in Oregon. If you haven't read it, I think you'd enjoy it.