Outies and innies

(The title refers to the extras)

Contre jour  at Caerfai Bay below St David's where someone had done some stone balancing. The tide was far out allowing me to indulge  my love affair with seaweed.

I often find the hollow brown husks of holdfasts washed up on the beach but thanks to the low water  here they could be seen alive and  anchoring the living fronds of furbelow (Laminaria) seaweed to the rocks. They fascinate me, knowing that below their knobbly surfaces they have welded themselves to the  substrate by penetrating the actual fabric of the stone, firmly enough to withstand the suction force of the violent and continual  action of the waves that thrash the seaweed to and fro.

At the back of the beach  where heaps of giant boulders invite  leaping and scrambling I made another discovery. Many of the vertical surfaces of the cliffs were pocked and pitted into reticulated networks of cavities that looked as organic, if less regular, as the wax chambers created by honey bees. Later I discovered that this is indeed known as honeycomb weathering and is found all over the world where certain conditions  exist, usually involving salt and wind erosion (Wikipedia) It's both eye-catching and invitingly tactile and I can't believe I've never noticed or heard of it before. 

(The protrusions on the holdfast and the pitted structure of the honeycomb rock seemed to mirror each other in reverse, hence my title.)