Fifty feet above it, shards of Hadrian's Wall stubornly clung to the top of a vast crag.
Jaffna's fort is still bare, the once-magnificent Dutch church lies in shards at crazy angles, and cows outnumber people on a new promenade around its seaward sides.
Failing that, a couple of rashers of back bacon will work, as will, in a different way – its shards offering a crunchy textural variation – stiff bookmarks of stridently scorched streaky.
In the horizontal blasts of cutting wind and freezing shards of ice from the nearby glaciers, it was hard enough to stand upright, let alone plant a tree.
The story ran that she dropped a glass bowl and fell on the shards, which slit her throat, slicing her jugular vein.
As great an actor as Grieg is, there's no escaping the fact that sitting through an episode of Episodes is like sitting through an eternity of having bamboo shards jammed into your urethra.
Outcropping shards of the underlying Precambrian rock seem a strikingly rugged intrusion into such a soft landscape.
Angular shards of concrete lie marooned beneath the bridge like fragments of an ice floe cast adrift.
This is the same attitude that leads to parents pompously handing out organic carob shards as their child's "sweet treat" as if letting them scarf down a Freddy Frog would result in the dismantling of western civilisation.
Abdel Rahman, a golden-robed fighter, says he quit his job as a lawyer after the government obliterated his home village last year with "barrel bombs" filled with metal shards.
The deaths of six people worldwide have been linked to metal shards being hurled from Takata's airbags when they inflate.South32, a company spun off by BHP Billiton to house some of its poorer-performing mining assets, such as aluminium, made a lacklustre debut on the Australian stockmarket (it did better in secondary listings in London and Johannesburg).
