St. Gothian Sands Nature Reserve

This is one of the pools at St. Gothian sands. It's now a nature reserve and coming on nicely too. But in it's last life it was used for commercial sand extraction, which is basically digging out thousands upon thousands of tonne of sand from a beautiful area and selling it to other areas to give them a beach, and many other pointless uses.

By doing this they alter the structure of the dunes and beaches for a long time to come.

Thankfully this practice has stopped here and it has been turned into a reserve. This practice has also gone on at the Hayle estuary and has only recently stopped (2004) but is always in threat of restarting. There is a local action group called SOS Hayle and they are looking to stop these practices forever and revert back to the the old way of clearing the estuary which involves using a sluicing method of clearing the estuary which has served the area for more than a hundred years. If you want more detailed information click on one of the links from this page.