Norfolk’s coastline veers from the placid to the chaotic depending on the weather. And we witnessed both during our stay in the pretty town of Wells Next The Sea.
The county has a coastline of crumbling cliffs, endless sandy beaches, salt-flats and marshes. Birdwatchers love its many nature reserves, sunbathers its sandier spots. Out to sea armies of wind turbine blades spin elegantly in the breeze, providing power for the mainland, while huge cargo vessels sail slowly towards ports closer to London.
On our first day in Wells – the final stop of our East Anglian 2020 staycation – we basked in the warm sunshine of late September. And judging by the socially distanced queues in the car park, much of England had turned out to join us. Clearly we weren’t the only ones who’d given up all hope of a holiday abroad in the year of Covid-19.
The tide was out, making the North Sea almost invisible to the naked eye, even once we’d walked the mile or so from the town’s modest harbour to the beach proper. Here the crowds enjoyed the last days of summer, old-fashioned beach huts stood guard and sand made its way into every orifice. On our last day in town, it was a different picture altogether. The tide was high, gales blew and waves crashed into the sea defences. It was nigh-on impossible to walk into the wind and we had to make do with a drive into the country to visit a few antiques shops.
Wells is an attractive little town that’s retained much of its character, boasting a little high street and some welcoming independent shops, numerous eateries and historic buildings. We stayed at The Crown Inn on the gorgeous Georgian square curiously known as the Buttlands, a square full of handsome houses and a couple of great pubs and restaurants. We finally found food in Norfolk and Suffolk that celebrated the local fisheries rather than the bland pub fare of fish and chips that had so dominated our holiday. How could it be that a county celebrated for its crab had managed to ignore it so conspicuously on the menus?
Wells isn’t the only high spot on this particular stretch of the north coast. A mile or two to the west is the Holkham Estate, which is centred on the Palladian Holkham Hall, the home of the Earls of Leicester. We took a wander through the estate to view its fabulous walled garden and stopped briefly in the neighbouring picture-postcard village, which seemed quite lifeless and more like a museum piece than a living, breathing settlement. The estate stretches to the sea a short walk away through pine woodlands and nature reserves. In recent times the sea has breached the sand dunes, creating a salty lagoon at high tide. When we visited the tide was out and we could walk across the flats to the beach, where thousands of shells spilled over the sand.
East Anglia has an ever-changing coastline. In places its sandy cliffs are unable to resist the North Sea storms and at Happisburgh we saw the consequences, where a village is crumbling into the sea and the cliffs are receding at an alarming rate.
At Blakeney there aren’t any cliffs as such but it regularly takes a battering from the storms and its little boats are sometimes left resembling matchwood. It was a glorious autumn day when we visited, clouds scudding across a deep blue sky. The village itself is achingly beautiful and historic, with twisting alleys and lanes lined with the kind of flint-fronted buildings that are such a feature of the towns and villages in Norfolk. It was once an important port before the harbour silted up and now it relies on tourists like us.
The day after our visit Blakeney was blasted by one of those vengeful storms but by then we had packed our bags in Wells and were preparing ourselves for the drive home…