Beach Jewels

Hasn't the weather been absolutely glorious this week? Just beautiful. Even up here in the North East (where we've spent a lovely few days) it's been sunny and mild. I say "even" as I have been coming here long enough to know that it always feels cooler up here, and that the cold north sea wind blows hard. On Wednesday we visited Seaham beach, on the Durham coastline. It's not somewhere I'd been before, but since reading Caroline's post last summer, I was very keen to go. Seaham beach, it turns out, is absolutely full of sea glass. Seriously, I have never seen so much in one place before. We found all this in the space of a couple of hours:

Not to mention this pottery:

I was particularly keen to find some "end of day" glass, so called because the local glass factories (long since closed) would tip waste glass into the sea at the end of the working day. It tends to have variegated patterns and different colours. This was our haul:

The pink piece (pink sea glass!!) is about 1 cm across, to give you some idea of scale, so quite small.

Looking for sea glass is enormously, incredibly, relaxing. It was absolute heaven to wander up and down the beach, scanning the pebbles to see what treasure lay hiding there. John and the kids joined in. 

Actually, Bella is completely obsessed with sea glass and has appropriated all that we found on Seaham beach to add to her already quite large collection. There are also some excellent rock pools and on a warmer day I'd have been in them, flip flops on, paddling around.

Occasionally we would find a kind of seam of glass, a small area rich in it, and if you pushed your hands in and under the pebbles there was more hiding, waiting to be found. It's a cliche to say that a piece of wet beach glass glistens like a jewel, but it's true, it does.

And of course the fun doesn't end when you leave the beach, as when you get home you get to play with the treasure, sorting and arranging your haul. Look, it's like a paint box of colour.

If you want to read more about Seaham sea glass, Emma of Silverpebble wrote a great post about it, and if you type "Seaham Sea Glass" into a search engine there is a lot more information out there. 

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Thank you for your kind words about our new home and all your good wishes. I am sorry I've been such a bad blogger lately, not visiting or saying hello, but I'll be back properly soon. Not having broadband has been both liberating and constraining. I've had a much, much more time to do other things without the siren call of the laptop, but often, when I've just wanted to check something (bank balance) or buy something or look something up, I've really missed it. And I've missed you all too.