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ANOTHER LIFE:IT IS ONE OF the richer threads to the weave of life on earth that the seaweeds on the rocky shores below me, and those in, say, Maine, across the Atlantic, where Rachel Carson used to go rock-pooling, are much the same species, growing in the same sequence of zones, from the topmost boulders right down to the waves and far out into the kelp forest offshore.

They have their separate niches, their different ways of dealing, at low tide, with exposure to sun and drying winds, their own forms of coping, frond by frond, with the surges of the sea. Their ecological regime, with local variations in species, goes right around the temperate shores of the world. Ireland has more than 500 seaweeds, and almost three-quarters of them are growing, in remarkable density and diversity, in the fretted granite coast of south Connemara.