What are we searching for, really, when we search for cowries?
Out on the skerries, the four of us are bent double. In the magical dells of the beach where shells gather, we search for them. I am teaching my eyes to scan the sand for their curved backs or slim, open mouths. Cowries — or groatie buckies as they’re also called — can be lilac, rose, purple, fawn, or tinged green with weed. But mostly they are blush pink, as if embarrassed to be discovered.
On these island beaches in the South Channel, only reachable by water and walkable at low tide, cowries are harder to find. Here, their rosiness blends with what lies beneath them. Hundreds of millions of broken bits of solid, purple-pink seaweed that I used to collect as a child, thinking it was coral.
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In the distance, the canoe we came in lies on the soft sand, the arriving sea whispering near its stern. A red canoe against aquamarine skies. Conditioned from years of smartphone use, I compose an image in my mind, imagine posting it to social media. It would be quick, easy. But the act of broadcasting this photogenic moment feels shallow, somehow, and so the image hardens in my camera roll instead.
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I don’t think my family and I have ever talked in detail about why we covet cowries. Why we spend hours scanning the foreshore, giving ourselves back pain for this prize over all others. In our bones, do we feel they hold more value than other shells? Do we know they were used as currency, that our sixteenth-century European ancestors used them to trade goods, or people?
Weeks later I wonder, looking at the plastic bag of shells I’ve brought back from the west coast, why I did not save a single piece of maerl instead.
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On the campsite, a few caravans along from ours, there’s an older couple who’ve been coming here for decades. He is always dressed in black; I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in colour. I pass him one night, his face now lunar-pale, and make a comment about chasing my tail with the outdoor chores. (We fill fresh water, we empty ‘grey’ waste water, we empty our waste). He shrugs, says to me in Glaswegian deadpan, ‘Pal, we’re on Arisaig time.’ I repeat this phrase to myself in the days that follow.
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I could describe it to you, if you have the time to listen. How the colour of its branches and cavities can change from bleach-white in beach sunshine, to the deep-sea purple of a new bruise. The texture of it against your fingertips. Bony, like chalk, or teeth. Snap it apart and you’ll find ‘tree rings’ of growth. A precious natural record of water temperature and sea chemistry over the centuries. Here, take a piece of maerl in your palm. Close your hand around it. What do you feel?
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Maerl regenerates painfully slowly. Some sources say the coralline algae grows around half a millimetre a year, others say up to two millimetres. Whichever it is, it’s negligible.
This tension between maerl time, and the speed at which our planet is warming, is why Scotland’s maerl beds — a crucial carbon-storing habitat for marine life like young scallops and sea urchins — are both so precious and so at risk. Projections quoted by the Scottish Wildlife Trust warn that on the current trajectory, we’ll see ‘an 84% decline in maerl bed distribution around Scotland.’
As our economic and political systems harm not only the environment but the people who call this planet home, some consider slowness an antidote. You can see it on social media: Slow food, radical rest, mindful travel, quiet quitting. Slowing down as an act of resistance. Romanticising a different way of being than the fast-paced capitalist machine we’ve all been told to accept as normal.
But I cannot romanticise this, or fabricate a personified fiction where the maerl, too, is resisting. A few weeks later, back at my day job for a climate non-profit, the weight of reality and the need for action press on my chest again. Wildfires, riots, floods, wars.
A question I’m almost too scared to voice rises like a tide in my gullet. On my work laptop, I open a map of Scotland’s marine environment. The Arisaig skerries are surrounded by five unique maerl beds, marked in pink hexagons. What happens if the radical change we need to fix the climate crisis comes as slowly as the maerl can grow?
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I’m sitting in the middle of the boat as we paddle away from the skerries. The breeze has picked up and I can hear the tinkling rigging of the two yachts at anchor in the sound. We notice too late: The waves have changed. Gentle, irregular ripples have become a band of sharp peaks and the four of us freeze as the water takes hold of the hull.
The tidal current twists the canoe to face north instead of east, leading us further into Loch nan Ceall. We jolt, begin again. Muscles burn, t-shirts stick, as we push heavily against the draw to keep our course.
When we land breathlessly on the rocky shore, cowrie shells still in our pockets, I replay the moment, consider the alternative. I imagine capsizing, falling beneath the surface, landing first on the pillowy bells of moon jellyfish and finally the maerl beds below.
Laura Anne Brown
Laura writes about Scotland’s places and people. Her features and essays have been published in Hidden Scotland, The Scots Magazine, and more. She lives by the sea in Fife.