Marvellous Maerl

A lovely albeit breezy walk to the Coral Beaches today.

The white sand is not actually sand or coral but dead fragments of a strange hard seaweed called maerl, crushed by the waves and bleached by the sun.

Living maerl is a beautiful purple-pink, and forms spiky underwater 'carpets' on the seabed.

Maerl is an unusual unattached form of a group of red seaweeds called 'coralline' algae.

These seaweeds deposit lime in their cell walls as they grow, giving them a hard, brittle skeleton.

Coralline algae are more familiar as hard, pink coatings lining rock pools on the seashore. Maerl is an unattached version, which grows as small branched nodules on sandy seabeds.

A great wee spot!