The giant boulders on the beach at Bathsheba stand on narrow stems, so that each one looks like a mushroom. Small marine animals cut those stems. They graze algae off the stone at the waterline, and their rasping slowly wears the base away until the block sits on a pedestal. The Atlantic surf that hammers this shore supplies the noise but does almost none of the shaping. The boulders themselves are fossil reef: slabs of coral limestone that broke off the cliffs behind the beach and came to rest on the sand. They are here because Barbados was built differently from the other islands in its chain. Its neighbours are volcanoes, while Barbados is a wedge of seabed sediment scraped off the Atlantic plate as that plate slid down beneath it, and the wedge is still rising about 30 centimetres every thousand years. Reef after reef grew around the coast and was then lifted clear of the water, leaving a staircase of dead reefs stepping up into the hills. Behind Bathsheba the coral cap has worn through altogether, exposing the far older seabed rock beneath it and giving the district its steep green ridges.
Offshore, swells that have crossed the open Atlantic meet a shallow shelf of reef and rear up into the Soup Bowl, a right-hand wave that Kelly Slater has called one of his favourites anywhere. The Independence Pro contest is surfed on it every November, when the winter groundswells arrive. Almost nobody swims here. The currents can strengthen without warning, so the only sensible place to get into the water is the line of shallow basins the reef has cut just off the sand. They fill, swirl and drain as the sets come through. The rest of Bathsheba is for watching, from the sand or from the grass of the beach park above it. The beach is free and open from sunrise to sunset, and the place has stayed a village of rum shops and guesthouses, with no resort strip.