Wave, Cut and Comb at Fleswick

Things that cling on to a space to live within the littoral zone are tough, mad, or both. You’d think these seaweeds would sink their hold-fasts into the hollows of this wave-cut stone platform to get the greatest purchase against wave and tide. Instead, they grow exclusively on the smoothed sandstone ridges where every eddy and surge will strive to pull them off, the undertow of pebbles will pummel them and at low tide, sunshine (not too much of a danger today) will desiccate them to a crisp. They lie as drooping and weary-looking as the combs on a flock Rhode Island cockerels, tattered and dark with bruise after hours of baiting. 

To add insult to injury a lone oystercatcher kicks and scratches over their prone bodies gobbling lice and hoppers who had hoped to hide. Or hopers that had hopped to hide. Higher up the beach even these hardy plants can cling no longer and we can go hopping and skipping ourselves from one miniature red pyke to another, avoiding soaking our shoes in the little salt lakes that divide them. 
And all the while the ocean roars, multi-tongued, cow-licking the beach in a rasp of grit and white foam, rolling back over rock to set the  weed into a chaos of motion again.