Enjoying a tasty treat from the salty sea

Damien Enright and family get stuck into the lovely limpet.

WHEN my granddaughter, from Hertfordshire, in England, started eating live limpets (aka barnacles) with gusto on a west Cork beach, I thought she was so enthusiastic there’d soon be none left. Where did the little girl learn to eat these exotic, delicious creatures? From her grandfather, I’m afraid, who learned from the Canary Islanders.

A pretty seven-year-old girl eating grey-brown molluscs, wet and slippery and prised from rocks, is not a common sight in Ireland and small girls generally turn up their noses at snails. Not Matilda, who finds them irresistible.