One enormous sand dune

Population 35-ish

One of the guests took the boys and I to the sand dunes today.  Massive, pure white dunes surround one of the bays.  The two boys jumps on snowboards and skied down them.  I thought they would break their necks, but they had obviously done this before.  I tried it myself.  It was a fun skid to the bottom but a long, steep scramble back to the top.

The guest had been coming to the island for 20 years and was telling me that the island had been one enormous stretch of sand.  He couldn’t believe how it had changed into scrubland in the last five years.  The sand is now held together by huge clumps of wiry grass and green bushes waist high.  There are some tiny trees that grow about knee high that looks like a miniature mature forest because of their gnarly, bonsai shape.   

I guess that’s what happens when you remove 25,000 sheep that have been eating everything green for the past 120 years.  The particularly wet summer has helped.  He pointed out one small tree (about six feet tall) amongst the grass and the scrubs “this used to be the marker for the road,” he said.  It used to be the only thing growing and the only way to plot your way across the sand.  Now the scrub is so thick the tree has almost disappeared and it’s almost impossible to drive off road.