Luskentyre

Luskentyre lies on the west coast of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides, where the Laxdale river reaches the Atlantic across a wide tidal flat. It is around three kilometres of sand backed by machair — the shell-rich grassland unique to these coasts — with the hills of North Harris behind and the island of Taransay offshore.

It is known for a resemblance that is entirely real and entirely misleading. The sand is white because it is made of ground shell rather than quartz, and shell sand reflects light the way coral sand does, so on a bright day the shallows turn turquoise. Photographs are regularly mistaken for the Caribbean. The water is around twelve degrees in August and rather less the rest of the year.

The shore is vast at low tide and much reduced at high, with the river channel shifting across it. There is no shelter from the Atlantic and the weather changes within the hour; sun, squall and sun again in a single visit is ordinary. The machair behind flowers through June and July and is grazed rather than mown, which is what keeps it. Seilebost, across the estuary, is the same beach seen from the other side and is emptier still; at low water the two are joined by sand flats that people walk across, though the river channel moves and the tide comes in faster than it looks.

Almost nothing is built. A small car park, a road that ends, a scattering of crofts, and the cemetery on the dunes. There are no facilities on the beach and no lifeguards anywhere in the islands.

Two kilometres of shell sand over a tidal flat, turquoise in the right light and grey-green in the wrong one, with the Harris hills behind. The water is twelve degrees. What people actually do here is walk, and the walk is better in a rising wind than in sunshine, which is the opposite of most beaches in this register.