Western Isles; drift seeds
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Western Isles; drift seeds by Martyn Gorman as part of the Geograph project.
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Western Isles; drift seeds
Image: © Martyn Gorman Taken: 7 Jul 2004
In the Department of Natural History in the University of Aberdeen there is a cabinet containing a remarkable collection of South American and West Indian seeds picked up on the shores of the Outer Hebrides. The seeds were gathered between 1908 and 1919 by William L. Macgillivray, the nephew of William MacGillivray the renowned zoologist and artist and formerly Regius Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen. Most were collected on West Sand at Eoligarry Image, near to where he lived, but some are from Lewis and some from the island of Fudag. The seeds had been transported across the Atlantic by the Gulf Stream, a warm surface ocean current which originates in the Gulf of Mexico and flows northeast across the Atlantic, driven by the prevailing southwest winds. The voyage of the seeds would have taken around 15 months.
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Image Location
Latitude
57.16796
Longitude
-2.106075