All through our stay on the Abergele coast I was puzzled and hornswoggled by a strange thing going on with the coastline. In search of "the elusive Black-headed gull" I scanned along the coastline towards Rhyl frequently from roughly just below where that number 79 is, .... there it is, as straight as a very straight thing .... right the way to, of course, Rhyl. Well, on the blasted map it is ..... But ... in real life, it was like this .... noticeably, obviously, curved. It actually stuck out a good bit more than that .... I blame my crap drawing. For example, I've tipped the steeple and the mast over to the left a bit. They weren't like that really. Most of their wind is from the left anyway ! Although some of the wind is, regrettably, from the people of Rhyl. We actually made a special expedition deep into the heart of Rhyl ....just to check that we weren't looking at something much further away ... and sure enough, we weren't... there was the church steeple, and the tall mast. in your actual Rhyl. And they were well sticky-out. Not another 17 miles away. So ...what's going on there then ? Well, the Ordnance Survey do put mistakes on their maps .... they do it so that if someone tries to photocopy and sell them, they can prove it actually is an OS map. But those " deliberate mistakes" are tiny, inconsequential things.... a barn is moved 2mm to the left, a lake is made slightly the wrong shape, that sort of thing. I don't think they would give the Welsh coastline a honking great twist to the left like that. Nor is the Welsh air ultra-refractive so as to make it appear curved. So we can rule "Curved Air" out. But what has all this got to do with birds ? Well, it was a bit of birding that found it out.So there. And it would make a right mess of any "quadrat-based" seabird counts. Oh yes. Oh Calamity ! Also , you'll be wondering why I didn't photograph it. Well, I did ... but mysteriously, they weren't there when I looked for them. Mind you, that does happen. It's a very cheap camera. 2/6 in old money. This one came out though .... Bangor pier ... she was just about to lock up ..... it wasn't locking-up time, but the decking was ,apparently ,too slippy after a whole day of rain. That was the day I didn't need to deploy " Radiohead". [See post 506] ..and once again, I've come up with a song that's got absolutely nothing to do with anything...
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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