Our poor old children.  We take them to the coast almost every week, but rarely do they get to play on the beach or swim in the sea.  We decided that we had better take them on a beach holiday somewhere.  We settled for Turkey, and the resort of Lara Beach.

Our hotel had its own private bit of beach, which was not really private at all; you could walk over to it from any of the other hotels along this stretch.  Of course, all the other hotels all had their private bit of beach too, so very few people bothered to cross between hotels.

The beach was sandy, but the shallows were shingle.  This shingle was brightly coloured.  Blacks, whites, yellows, reds, greens, oranges – grab a handful and all these colours would glint up at you in the bright sun.  My favourite pebbles were striped.

To find out how these stripes were formed I did a Google image search.  For the second time (the first time was a few weeks ago, to identify a headless fish) I was taken straight to a blog which I already follow, Jessica’s Nature Blog.  Jessica had found some similar stones in the UK, formed in the Jurassic period.  The white lines of her pebbles were calcite, formed between limestone layers.  In her pebbles, the calcite bands often stood proud of the surface of the pebbles.  In our pebbles, however, the white bands were mostly sunken, presumably meaning they erode more quickly.  Perhaps our pebbles are made of something other than limestone and/or calcite?  Geology is not one of my stronger subjects…

It took a long time to amass any significant number of these pebbles.  As the waves rolled in we would have to reach down to the shingle floor, ducking our heads under the water, to bring up a handful of pebbles.  We might find a striped one every three or four handfuls or so.  Over the course of a few days we found enough to fill a couple of small water bottles.  We brought them home and will find a glass dish, basket, or something similar to display them in.

Points in this post (copy and paste the co-ordinates into Google Earth):

• Pebble Collecting Point:  N 36° 51.103 E 030° 51.730

• Date of Visit: July 2013