The Afon Mawddach estuary Barmouth, from the railway and footbridge that crosses the estuary, taken during one of our recent Welsh breaks. It doesn’t seem very exciting, a walk alongside a railway track across a bridge, but when the walk coincides with a incoming tide the estuarine landscape changes minute by minute before your eyes, as water swirls in along channels across and along the estuary. It is not a steady ingress of water, as in a bath filling, but streams are created, which turn into rivers of brine, separated by increasingly wet sand. Oyster catches and other sea birds (which, since I am not an ornithologist, I can only categorise as seagulls of various breeds) drill for shellfish in the sand, dragging them to the surface to be shaken and swung against rocks to expose the snack inside. Eventually the rivers start to coalesce, herding the birds into fewer more dense flocks, until the rivers eventually join, the swirling waters calm, and the small boats dotted around the harbour are lifted from the sand to float on their more natural environment.
