Coral art

Last week we visited Claigan beach on Skye's Vaternish peninsula.  As you approach the beach you think it is a wonderful dazzling white sandy beach, but it actually is not sand at all, but a coralline deposit formed by a type of seaweed known as maërl.
Unusually for a seaweed, maërl grows a hard outer skeleton by depositing lime in its cell walls, forming little branched nodules.
These collect into underwater beds which provide shelter for marine animals – young scallops in particular.  
My granddaughter is very much a child of nature and spent a good part of her time on the beach collecting some of the very small pieces of coral, which she then used to make this figure.  Unfortunately we were unable to access any artist's glue, so her figure will need to be dismantled to transport home where I'm sure it will be transformed into something different.