Country diary: A stranded traveller that looks more plastic than animal | Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

Appledore, Devon: By-the-wind sailors have been washed up in great numbers this summer. I stumble on a single one of these bright blue beauties

Amid the hot grit of the estuarine beach, a cool light glints. Not the habitual shade of mussel shells, nor even the shimmer of sea glass, this is a blue so bright that at first I mistake it for a kind of plastic, perhaps the discarded part of a pair of goggles.

I’m about to pick it up when something prompts me to pause, mid-swoop; an inkling that this is not synthetic, but animal.