UKC

I was wandering around the beach on the other side of Compass Point (i.e. the Bude harbour side) and found a big old fallen slab. I walked up it, and noticed a double line of old rusted bolts on the blanker right hand side of it. Seemed like a funny old route for someone to have put up. Anyone know more about it?

In reply to jhsp:

They are probably natural. Some species of barnacle extract excess iron from seawater as a by-product of their filter feeding and deposit it in their oddly shaped outer shell (really a modified carapace). When they die, the rest of the shell decays leaving the rusty iron deposits and a charactistic hole where the original opening was.

They occasionally appear in all sorts of odd coastal locations. It causes no end of misunderstandings.

In reply to Dave Garnett:
Alternatively the poster might have spotted bolts rather than dead molluscs? As they said 'bolts'.

I eagerly await a whole series of posts suggesting that bolts appearing on routes are, in fact, completely natural and nothing to worry about...

In reply to andyathome:

In Cornwall, surely not?

They do look like rusty bolts... It's an easy mistake to make.

And barnacles are crustacea, not molluscs.