At Dogs Bay

Dogs Bay in Connemara has a wonderful white sandy beach composed of the tiny shells of microscopic one-celled creatures that live mostly on the mud of the ocean bed. These animals are called Foraminifera. When they die, millions upon millions of their calcium skeletons, bearing many chambers and holes, and not visible to the naked eye, wash ashore to form this unusual sand. This is such a rare occurrence that Dogs Bay beach is the only one composed of foraminifera in the northern hemisphere.

The bedrock of the land around this wonderful white sandy shore is made up of volcanic rocks including granite that has many different colour forms and patterns due to the different mineral crystals that it contains – if you get up really close to see it. The granite outcrops on the shores often have a rounded surface where ice sheets or glaciers passing over them have ground them smooth. The waterside rocks form attachments for a variety of seaweeds, along with many seashore creatures, particularly gastropod molluscs like periwinkles and limpets, whose brightly-coloured empty shells accumulate at the base of boulders low down in the intertidal zone.

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