Day 5: Blakeney to Stiffkey

I wake up at 4.30 am, uncomfortable and a bit cold. It’s light and I decide to go for a dawn chorus walk over the nearby Blakeney Freshes. In terms of birdsong, the furious cooing of wood pigeons, especially from the town, overpowers everything else. With the orange/red sun half emerged over the horizon of the saltmarsh I discover samphire where the edges of the path gets muddy. These succulent green stalks are collected by locals who supply restaurants with them or sell them from wooden stalls around and about (“Samphire £1.50 a bunch – please put money in tin”). I try picking some but it’s difficult without uprooting them or crushing the fleshy stems. Having been told on an “edible wild plants walk” I had gone on in Kent that uprooting was not good practice and illegal, I decide to have a go at another spot when I have my scissors with me.

After porridge, raisins and a catch up kip I head off for a boat trip to see the seals at Blakeney Point - Blakeney’s big attraction. The trips don’t go from Blakeney Quay any more because the harbour is so silted up that you have to leave from nearby Morston Quay. The boat leaves at 10.30 am, but when I get there a little after 9.30 there is little sign of a rising tide. Sitting in the shade on a raised viewing platform I focus my eye on a fixed point in the mud and gradually the waterline reaches it and then submerges it. After a while I step down to join the growing throng of mums, dads, grandparents, and kids; there’s even a handful of Japanese tourists. Bean’s Boats run our trip and their people mill about with luminous orange jerkins with smiley seal faces on them. At last it’s 10.30 and we troop onto the boats - there are two each taking about 30 passengers.


We chug out and reach the open waters of the harbour, enclosed to the north by the long arm of Blakeney Spit. The many boats around us that seem doomed to spend most of their time mired in the mud are now bobbing happily on the sea as their makers intended. The other boat chugs ahead to the sandy tip of the spit while we hang back. I can just discern with the naked eye something dappled and bumpy looking disturbing the smooth line of the sand, which I think must be the seals. After five minutes the boat ahead moves along and it is our turn to home in, and gradually the shapes of 50 or so common and grey seal begin to clearly appear. Some lie still on the sand, some are looking at us, or at least towards us, with dog-like heads cocked quizzically. Some wriggle across the sand a little, like bound escapologists trying to slip from their bonds. They are large and impressive but clumsy and vulnerable looking. By contrast, a few heads emerge above and between the waves, appearling altogether more at ease and in their element.

 The boat moves forward, turns round, and we are afforded another few minutes viewing. Everyone is snapping away taking pictures, or filming videos. I’m torn between doing the same and sitting back and taking in the encounter while it lasts, as our boat bobs quietly before these rare lumbering sea beasts. They are still a little distance and I know my camera’s 18-55 mm lens lacks to zoom to take the pictures I’d like to.Inevitably the boat moves on and begins to wheel round the point to the land facing side where the sand turns to shingle. The background sound of screeching sea birds increases, and within a minute we find ourselves in the midst of another natural marvel. The spit is home to a major colony of sandwich tern, who take advantage of this remote, fenced off strip of pebble beach to lay their camouflaged eggs in shallow scrapes, and there raise their young. The tern fly past us in furious activity, silvery fish in their beaks, delivering food to their speckled chicks, or plunging into the sea to catch the sand eel and whitebait that they feed on. The noise is terrific, and unprepared I struggle to capture the action with my camera - these elegant sea-swallows whizzing past and around us, with the seals loafing in the background. It really is a remarkable, contrasting scene.

Sandwich terns and seals at Blakeney Point

 The excitement over, we stop for an hour a little way along the Point by the old lifeboat house, now an information centre since the old slipway got too clogged up with pebbles. I walk by the little huts on the dunes that are owned by Blakeney folk who may neither sell nor let them, then come out on the North Sea beach where fences and signs protecting the tern and seal from the destructive intrusion of man and his beasts warn you to walk no further,.


Back at Blakeney I ready to leave for my next stop at Stiffkey. It is only 5 miles along the coastal path. Walking the pleasant mile or so between Blakeney and Morston Quay a third time today irks me only a little bit. Coming out of Morston I see a couple of elderly samphire pickers and onwards from here I realise that the plant is to be found in vast quantities on the marshes, which are also peppered at this time of year with a pretty mauve coloured flower I don’t know the name of. The sun breaks through a gauze of cloud. I reach a place called Stiffkey Fen, and then signs indicate 1½ miles to Stiffkey, and the beginning of Stiffkey marshes, the biggest expanse of saltmarsh yet, which goes out and out till it reaches sand flats which in turn go out and out to the end of the horizon. Seeing a car park ahead and tents peeping through the trees to my left I know I have arrived at my destination.


The High Sand Creek Campsite is an old anti-aircraft training camp that sits next to the path and marshes and belongs to the local farm. A number of grey barrack like buildings remain on site and the lady in the wooden hutted office tells me that campers used to use the old military washing facilities until a new toilet and shower block was built 12 years ago. I check in and gratefully accept a pitch under a shady tree, along with the use of a plastic chair thoughtfully thrown in to augment my meagre camp comforts.


Around the campsite it’s a familiar scene; campers are soaking up the sunshine, relaxing at little tables and behind windbreaks with their bottles of wine, tending to barbecues, busying themselves with this or that. Many campers I have seen seem content to while away the day without going beyond the confines of their site. There is always some little job to do. For the most part, camping is the proximity of nature made tolerable by the rituals of domesticity. On a beautiful day like today though, nature needs little assistance.


At a little before 6 on this Sunday afternoon and in search of food and beer, I take a walk into the village, the hot sunshine seeming to accentuate the extraordinary quietness and stillness of the place. The Old Red Lion offers a cooling and pleasant pint of Woodforde’s Nelson’s Revenge, and I treat myself to a meal of sea bass and salad, along with another Pint of Nelson’s. The food is good, but as with most of the pubs I have come to on my journey, it caters mostly for diners and doesn’t offer much prospect of diverting bar room chat. (The exception to this generality was the Ship Inn in Weybourne, which had a public bar, a pool table and a handful of locals.

I wander down into the heart of the village, which is at the bottom of a valley in rolling green pasture. It is quieter than ever. Strangely someone has cut a hedge into the shape of an electric guitar. I stop at a grassy bank at an idyllic stone bridge by a shallow clear river, part shaded by trees. The silence is broken by the rude quacking of a female mallard that comes alongside me. Shortly afterwards she is joined by seven chicks and another mallard, and her quacking is calmed. I read the inscription on the bench by the bridge, dedicated to the village blacksmith who died in 1998.

“IN LOVING MEMORY OF WILLIAM (BILLY) GIDNEY
VILLAGE BLACKSMITH2.10.1901 - 8.4.1998"

Whether the situation he left vacant was ever filled I don‘t know.