Life's A Beach

Leaden grey skies continued to hang heavy over the land all this week, variation coming only in the form of drizzle, fog and occasional downpours. Nothing for it but to scroll back a week to a day of dazzling blue skies when, after a walk at Dersingham Bog, there was still time for a stroll on the north Norfolk coast.

The transition from land to sea can, in some places, be abrupt and clearly delineated; a line of cliffs, say, with sea on one side and land on the other. All very neat, concise and clearly defined. North Norfolk is not at all like that.

Here land and sea do not so much brush shoulders as they walk side by side, but instead they hold hands, link arms and, when nobody's looking, become so intimately entwined that it's difficult to decide where one ends and the other starts.

The coast becomes a loose, unravelling skein of sand dunes, beaches, mudflats, shallow inlets, salt marshes and offshore sand bars. Threading its way through the drier parts of it is the North Norfolk Coastal Path, while further inland runs the coastal road. In places there are rather incongruous pine tree plantations, planted on some of the dunes to stabilise them and provide some shelter from the wind.

All this shifting, irresolute frontier between the solid and liquid worlds is much to the liking of many kinds of birds, especially during the winter months. Rafts of sea ducks loiter offshore, gulls sweep past out to sea, Sanderlings skedaddle back and forth before the incoming waves while other, less energetic, waders probe the mudflats for tasty morsels. And in spring the pinewoods become a refuge for exhausted migrant birds.

And all the while the waves of the North Sea lap along the beaches slowly moving the sand, shifting the seashells and murmuring soporifically. It's hard to imagine this same sea can at times become enraged enough to break through the sea-defences and inundate the land.

Even in midsummer you need to watch the tide-tables here as the sea can come in very rapidly across these vast sands. 

So remember, have a good run, fetch that stick, but for goodness sake....

take care.