Here, award-winning songwriter and musician David Gray shares his love of the north Norfolk Coast; the special place it has become for him and his family and the wildlife he enjoys and loves.

‘When I want to clear my head, I like to get out into the wild and walk; not so much escaping from things as escaping into things. There can be no doubt that my favourite place to do this is the North Norfolk Coast, and even though I have been returning there now for over twenty years my passion for it remains as vibrant as ever.

A brooding no-man’s-land, alive with the sounds of calling birds and huge flocks of geese.


To head out onto the coast is to enter into a landscape of dramatic horizontals, and chasing skies; a place of constant shift and change that is continually shaping and reshaping, making and unmaking itself.

Wind, water, sand, cloud, mudflat, scrub and meadow; its power as a landscape doesn’t come from its landmarks or its geological mass but rather from the opposite. Its dreaminess, its mutability. It also has a unique and very particular sense of wildness. This seems to emanate from the marsh itself. A brooding no-man’s-land, alive with the sounds of calling birds and huge flocks of geese.

To walk the paths along the flood defences and drink in the majesty of this widescreen world is to discover also an accompanying sense of unbounded freedom; like intimations of limitless space. From the dreamy intimacy of its dunes to the exhilarating expanses of its vast and empty beaches, the North Norfolk Coast is a place to lose yourself, a place of non-attachment. Whenever I get there and immerse myself in the landscape, I have a sense of lightness, like a weight being lifted.

A partial migrant

My wife and I first discovered the North Norfolk Coast on a blisteringly hot weekend in 1992, it came recommended by a friend who’d just returned from Blakeney, and it was appealingly convenient for East London, where we lived at the time, being just a couple of hours up the M11.

Our first stop was Cromer, then we moved on to Blakeney (still a favourite) and finished up at Wells. We were hooked, and as the years went by kept coming back for long weekends, sometimes in the spring and summer but occasionally out of season too, and by doing so discovered that we almost loved it more when the geese had arrived and the tourists gone.

We were often fantasizing about having a little bolt hole up there, and when things took off with my music there was really nowhere else that we seriously considered.

We have been coming here now for almost 25 years now but find that we love the place more and more as the years go by. It is somewhere that has come to feel like a second home and where we can leave the pressures of London life behind.

Nature’s home

Holme Dunes by Richard Osbourne


As anyone knows who has spent any time there, the North Norfolk Coast is an incredible place for experiencing wildlife. The long stretch of coast from Snettisham to Cley is something of a birdwatching mecca. I love the love whole coastline but since we bought our house near Holme- next-the-sea, the Holme Dunes reserve has very much become my local patch. Obviously I’m a little biased, but I think that Holme Dunes is one of the most beautiful and rewarding sections of the entire coastline. It is also for some reason, one of the least discovered.

I am a hugely enthusiastic though not very expert birdwatcher. When I was a child growing up in Manchester I would pore endlessly over bird and nature books. Then when my parents relocated to Solva, west Wales my connection with nature deepened further as I came face to face with adders, grass snakes, gannets, kestrels, buzzards, seals and a whole host of other creatures. It wasn’t until I bought a place in north Norfolk though that my passion for watching birds really took hold.

A few days after we bought our first cottage in Stiffkey, I opened the bedroom curtains to discover that I was face-to-face with an absolutely stunning male sparrow hawk who was sitting on the kitchen roof just a matter of feet away. I drank in the detail of all his beautiful orange barring before he turned to glare at me with blazing eyes. I felt the quickening of my childhood birdwatchers pulse. A few days later I went out and bought myself a pair of second hand binoculars.

The binoculars were a game changer. Something simple but profound had happened, and my birdwatching universe had been transformed. I’ve never looked back. It’s simply amazing to be able to peer into another creature’s world even for just a few fleeting minutes, and for those brief suspended moments, feel everything else just simply disappear.

A few of my favourite things:

The barn owl
If I had to pick a favourite Norfolk creature it would have to be the Barn Owl.
It’s a magical bird and even though I come across them regularly on my walks, I count every single encounter like a blessing. I think viewing them in winter, quartering the meadows in low sun, is perhaps the most special time of all.  A silent, ghost-like presence in a dream like world.

Reed beds and sea holly

If had to pick a most loved Norfolk plant it would be a toss-up between the humble reed and the dune plant, sea holly. The reed is so emblematic and animates the landscape as it sways and bends in the wind. The winter light catching the flower heads is a thing of beauty. Stunning.

Sea holly by David North



Sea holly meanwhile is a low lying, silvery blue rather sculptural plant that grows abundantly amongst the grasses in the dunes. I love to see it in flower but I also love it in its various stages of wintery decay. Towards the end of summer, its flowers are often covered with burnet moths. I’ve made up my mind that one day I’m going either make a large painting or sculpture of one.

My special Norfolk...

If I had to pick a favourite Norfolk memory I would be hard pushed to beat the time a few years ago that I went swimming with my daughter off Gore Point. Even though it was the end of September, for several days the temperature was hitting almost 80F. It was a picture-perfect day bathed in golden autumnal light so seeing as we were both up early we decided that we would take a walk down to the beach where I knew there was set to be a really high tide.

As soon as we arrived there great flocks of knot and dunlin began making spectacular flights all around us. We watched spellbound for a while but it was becoming a hot morning and the glassy calm of the water looked too good to resist. We splashed and swam while the birds wheeled in iridescent shoals overhead. It was unforgettable.

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