Day 4: Blakeney

Around 7 am, outside the public loos that must serve me and my fellow campers as a washroom, I catch the smell of bacon coming from a van in the Blakeney Quay car park. Tempted, I go over and purchase a tea while considering the steep asking prices for a bacon bap. I’m asked by the swarthy old car park attendant, chatting to the van owner, if I’m camping in the field - something about my appearance has obviously made this evident to him. I chat and joke with him and the van owner about the campsite and ask if they know anything about the owner Mr. S, which they don’t. I decide a bacon bap is a necessity and sit down to share it with a friendly sparrow and a crow.


A kerfuffle breaks out by the car park hut, where a skin headed thug in shorts has got out of a white estate car and started threatening and pushing our friend the car park attendant. “Come on then. Come on then. Let’s do it now, let’s sort this out here and now” he’s shouting, squaring up and pushing our man disdainfully with his fingertips. The car park guy stands his ground and laughs it off as a bit of a joke; which it clearly isn’t. “He’s the local idiot”, says the breakfast van owner, perhaps to assure me that there’s only one. The confrontation fizzles out and car park man returns, “wasn’t going to let him provoke me at work,” he laughs. Fair play to him, he looks a tough enough old sort.

Blakeney Quay

With no plan for the day I walk around the town for a while, looking in the shops, looking at the boats for sale board. A shower of rain sends me and others running for shelter in the stone arched remains of Blakeney Guildhall. The Guildhall is a relic from long ago when this was a major sea port and trading post. Over the centuries Blakeney Spit, now a 9 mile shingle bank, has extended it’s long arm across the harbour, gradually cutting the port off from the sea, silting up most of the harbour and turning it into saltmarsh. Now only the smallest boats can thread their way along the ever narrowing inlet to the quayside, and then only during a few hours at high tide. Neighbouring Cley and Wiveton, themselves once significant ports, are completely cut off. Many harbour towns in East Anglia have suffered similar fates. Some, like Dunwich in Suffolk, have literally fallen into the sea. Blakeney and its neighbours has been cut off from it. Despite new activities like tourism that keep the town appearing prosperous, you can’t escape the feeling that Blakeney is a place that has, historically, had its day, and is doomed to be forever in want of its former purpose.


After lunching on milk, sweets and Norfolk strawberries I decide to head inland. Taking the road to nearby Langham I go left at the first country footpath, which turns off by an untidy holding of caravans, building works, kids play equipment and a net covered quail farm. All this is guarded by two large excitable dogs that bark at me furiously from behind a wire fence. The nervous quail live up to their name, drawing back in fear to the far side of their netted Stalag while I walk past.


After a half hour's walk through fields and hedges, with the sun warming up, I come to a place called Wiveton Downs, a designated Area of Special Scientific Interest. These “downs” sit on Blakeney Esker, a glacial formation consisting of five high ridges of sand and gravel deposited here by meltwater distributaries that ran at the bottom of the huge ice sheet that covered this area (and most of Norfolk) during the last ice age. In appearance it’s a parched looking, gorsy, undulating heathland, extensively sculpted with rabbit burrows, that offer raised views of the imposing St. Nicholas Church tower rising above the trees, and the sea beyond. The terrain is similar to Beacon Hill visited a couple of days ago, which is also an ice age formation. Again I hope to see a snake, without expectation. For Centuries Wiveton Downs were heavily quarried for sand and gravel, until all the useful stuff had gone around 1880. Today the vegetation is managed to encourage the kinds of plants that thrive on the esker’s well drained sandy acidic soil, which provides an ideal habitat for linnet, woodcock, short eared owl, and yellow hammer. I know all this because I read it all on one of the permanent illustrated information boards and wrote it down. This is also where I learned that the cliff-hillock over Sheringham is Beeston Bump – a hump of sand and gravel formed when all the surrounding rock eroded away. Why the rest was eroded while Beeston Bump remained is not explained; there is only so much these informative boards can tell you.


Sitting on the highest point of Wiveton Downs as the afternoon gets later, with my mobile phone battery dead, I reflect on the advantages of being along on my trip. My time is entirely my own and does not need to be negotiated with another. I can walk at my own pace, stop, sit, even read information boards, something you never feel easily able to do, say, with your kid in tow. Eventually I get down from my elevated perch and head down the single track country road that heads back to town. There is no traffic about, the sun is shining, and the only thing to be heard is the breeze blowing through the hedges and the occasional “pop, pop” of a very distant shotgun. I kick a stone down the middle of the road for a while and congratulate myself on what a good combination of idleness and endeavour my trip is becoming.

What's on in Blakeney

In the evening I stew up some instant noodles and mushrooms and head to the local British Legion where a Neil Young tribute band “Don’t Spook the Horse” render Harvest Moon and Old Man more than competently. I peer in to the fairly packed hall but am content to listen outside with a pint and a smoke while my batteries charge by the bar.