Scientists argue about its origins and its movements, fishermen cast their lines from it, summer visitors swim from it, birders scan it with their telescopes, tired migrants find landfall on it, wind and wave shape it, artists and photographers strive to capture its many moods: this is the strange, shape-shifting, shingle edge of Norfolk.
A walk on the shingle ridge between Weybourne and Blakeney Point is a walk of discovery. The landscape is never quite the same from one tide to the next; change happens and the unexpected is always possible. Tide, wind and history weave patterns here which unravel with a chance sudden storm.
I’m heading for Cley beach car park to do a walk which I have done so many times. Arriving at Cley beach on a Saturday morning there is a gaggle of birders on the shingle, sheltered in the lee of the brick and pan-tiled beach shelter, each peering seaward with quiet concentration through their tripod-mounted ‘scopes’. A few hundred metres further along the beach two fishermen stand windswept, guarding long rods, their figures misted by salt spray.
My mood today was grey. But it’s strange how a landscape of grey skies, grey sea and grey shingle works its alchemy on me. I feel my spirits lift; the energy of the breaking waves, the taste of salt, that roar of shingle being pulled and pushed by every wave. This is a place to find the wild inside me and the wild outside.
Turnstone, by Elizabeth Dack
Today my walk will be short: just up to Cley Marshes’ famous East Bank and back. On days with more time to spend I might have walked five kilometres west to Blakeney Point to see the seals, or instead headed east, past land which Norfolk Wildlife Trust recently acquired, to the village of Salthouse. Still, even with just an hour to spend on this grey winter day, there is plenty to enjoy: a red-throated diver scudding over the waves; and parties of brent geese winging their way in off the sea to feeding grounds on Cley Marshes. I sit and watch two turnstones busily probing seaweed on the strand-line, and doing just what their name suggests, tossing small pebbles aside with their short, slightly dished powerful beaks. They may have spent the summer in Greenland or Canada but today they seem very much at home here on Cley beach, happy to ignore my presence and to feed just metres from where I’m sitting.
On my outward journey I walk just above the breaking waves. A single seal, only its rounded head visible, bobs in the surf and gazes briefly at me before vanishing. Overhead young black-headed gulls and common gulls fly up and down the shore, patrolling the surf, alert for anything washed up and edible. Like them I’m also alert for washed up treasures: the spiral core of a large whelk shell or a curious pearly white oyster shell. And under my feet the endless fascination of tide wet flints, white, black, yellow, bronze and brown; a geological treasure trove, born in Cretaceous tropical seas, scraped up and pushed here by great sheets of ice, then fashioned and shaped by a million tides. A gift to me: flint pebbles in every shape and size; some smooth and rounded, others rough and angular; all sea-cold to the touch.
At the East Bank I scan across the pools and reedbeds. On one side Norfolk’s most famous nature reserve, Cley Marshes, and on the other Arnold’s Marsh, named after the Edwardian gentleman gunner, Edward Arnold, who, though he shot many rarities here, donated the marsh to the National Trust in 1949.
There are ducks galore: teal, wigeon, shelduck, shoveler and gadwall. And over Cley’s reeds a lone marsh harrier first spooks a redshank into noisy flight, then puts up a black and white flock of lapwing and a few smaller, pointy-winged, golden plover. The shingle ridge provides protection for these famous nature reserves with their reedy freshwater pools a winter home to internationally important numbers of migratory geese, ducks and waders. But for how much longer?
This is an extreme and challenging environment, baked dry in the summer sun, swept by autumn gales that coat each pebble in salt-spray, pelted by hail and storms in the cold of winter. Yet somehow life finds first a toe-hold and then a new home. Visit in the summer and the yellow-horned poppies will glow translucent gold in the sun: a new spectacle and a new chapter in the story of our shingle ridge.
Yellow-horned poppy, by Bob Ward
I walk back to Cley beach car park following the line of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust fence on the inland side of the shingle ridge. This protects some of these new shingle fans from disturbance by people. These areas will hopefully become significant new breeding areas for birds including ringed plover, skylark and perhaps even terns or avocets. Today a male stonechat with orange breast, smart black head and white neck collar ventures out from a fence post returning each time to its favoured perch. As I walk back to my car small flocks of goldfinches bring a touch of brightness to the day as they forage for dock seeds on the shingle. In the distance over Cley village, a great ‘V’ shaped skein of pink-footed geese forms dark, ever-changing lines across the grey sky. What a special place this is, and how lucky I am to have the chance to know and love it.
Header image by David Tipling