Flood tide

Having failed to find any time for a summer holiday, we decided to have a family day out to the Norfolk Coast, making the most of the unseasonably warm weather. It proved to be a very good decision and was certainly not a 'washout' (see extra)!

We arrived at lunchtime and, after a tasty picnic, pottered round Holkham Beach NNR for a few hours. There was a surprising amount still in flower, including thrift, which is usually out in late spring, but today was providing a useful nectar source for wall brown and small copper butterflies, both of which were quite frequent in the fixed dunes, with frequent territorial battles occurring. Thousands of pink-footed geese, recently returned from the Arctic, were grazing in the fields beyond the pinewoods planted along the back of the dunes, and they regularly broke out into very vocal squabbles, providing a more autumnal soundtrack to our day. 

In the late afternoon we moved to the beach at Wells-next-the-Sea where there were boats and fishermen to watch, and of course the wonderful variety of painted beach huts,  although most were in the shade of the pine forest. In reality most of the huts are glorified garden sheds, but they cost an eyewateringly large amount to buy - somewhere between £50,000 and £70,000! But what a setting...

We then drove to the Jolly Sailors pub for dinner, a family tradition - we've been visiting regularly for well over twenty years! Before we went in we walked down to Brancaster Staithe, a very characterful corner of the coast, not at all prettified, with plenty of boats in various states of repair, some interesting, now disused, oyster ponds and miles of undisturbed saltmarsh. We soaked in the salty atmosphere, listening to the plaintive calls of curlew and redshank as the tide flooded the muddy creeks and the descending sun set the sky on fire. We watched a few ragged skeins of Brent geese returning from Siberia and just before we left a spoonbill flew over...Perfect!