A bale of straw

It's always fun to visit the beach after a big rain storm. 

You know you'll find all sorts of interesting bits of vegetation swept down the nearby rivers and washed up on the sand, all eminently sniffable. 

But a bale of straw??

Imagine its story. In springtime, a farmer plants seeds in his fields beside the banks of the River Dee. Over the course of the summer, the fresh green barley sprouts out of the bare earth. By August, the landscape is aglow with carpets of ripe golden barley, the whiskered spikes dancing in the breeze. Come harvest, the business end of the barley is separated and dispatched to local whisky distilleries for malting, and the straw is baled up for use as animal bedding and feed. And then along comes a massive storm, the fields flood and the bales of straw are swept up by the river before they can be collected. Most of the bales break up but a few survive the torrent and the waves more or less intact, and here one of them sits on the beach awaiting 'decoration' by the local dog population...