Winterton-on-Sea to Caister-on-Sea and return

I've talked before, in my descriptions of the Norfolk/England Coast Path between Cromer and here, of the impact of coastal erosion and also of the fact that when checking tide times in advance, they have sometimes seemed rather inaccurate. Today, the combination of those things rather transpired against us, though I think the tide times I had for Hemsby were probably pretty accurate. I'd manage to convince myself that the sea would be further away than it turned out to be in places, as we walked along the beach from Hemsby to Scratby. So we had a bit of an adventure! The walk was also unexpected in that I had thought that we'd be mostly walking through built-up holiday resorts, but with the exception of a section in Hemsby, the walk was rather wilder than that would imply. It was a pleasant walk on a sunny if rather windy day.

The time tables gave low water at Hemsby at 7.47 and high water at 13.27. We left home soon after 7.30 so as to get the outward leg of our walk as close to low tide as possible; we reached Winterton soon after 9am, and parked by a little green at TG494195. This is obviously a popular parking spot for those who, like us, want to avoid the £7 it costs to park down on The Common. However, when we arrived there was plenty of space. By 9.10 we had set off walking, heading back down through the village towards the coast and turning right just after the houses ended. According to the map, we were in the dunes but, as on our route around Winterton last time we were here, we were actually quite some distance from the sea, on land that would have been dunes at some stage in the past but now has well-established heathland vegetation.

The area we were on is marked on the map as "The Valley" and it is clearly a popular dog-walking area; relative to the people we passed, we were distinctly lacking in at least two dogs! "The valley" is an accurate description, and Richard spotted that the higher land to our right is actually an inland cliff, formed by coastal erosion but then left some distance from the sea during a period of deposition. To our left were more conventional (and more recent!) dunes. On the other side of the dunes, though we couldn't see if from here, more recent sea erosion is causing a new cliff to form. We walked along The Valley for a mile or so, passing on the cliff to our right first the curious thatched roundhouses (actually holiday lets) and the lighthouse (once the genuine article but now also a holiday cottage) in Winterton, then houses, then open land, then more houses (now in Hemsby). The healthland gave way to car park, now with the giant slide and dodgems of Hemsby Fun Park to our right.

We reached the lifeboat station at "Hemsby Gap". There is access to the beach here, though recent erosion has started to create a cliff on the beach, and just a few days ago the Hemsby inshore lifeboat was out of action because its slipway had been destroyed. I only found out about the difficulty launching the lifeboat in my usual post-walk research, and when we were on our walk we didn't appreciate just how recently diggers had been in action right here. However, there were plenty of tyre tracks and we could see a digger working further along the beach. There is a choice of routes for the next section of path, either along the beach or on a track slightly further inland which heads off from near the lifeboat station and cafes. We chose the former for our outward walk (it was after all only about 9.50, only just over 2 hours after low tide), in the expectation that we'd use the inland route for our return. We were slightly concerned that we wouldn't be able to get past the digger, and we could also see that there was a section of coast beyond the digger where the water came quite close to the cliff. But we could make some sand out too - and then we saw a runner coming towards us.

There were plenty of people on the beach close to Hemsby Gap, but by the time we got to the digger and a dumper track working with it, there was just us and the machines. Would we be able to get past? Maybe. The digger was transporting sand in an attempt to shore up a quite spectacular cliff fall, leaving a shed above hanging on the edge of the cliff. The beach was definitely narrower than it had been and the digger arm was swinging round at about our height, so it wouldn't have been safe to try to pass without being sure the driver had seen us, but eventually he did and we passed safely and continued behind some concrete slabs. However our difficulties weren't over.

We were approaching the section where, from a distance, the water had appeared to come quite close to the cliff; it had got noticeably closer as we had walked along the beach and we decided we wouldn't be able to get past. The cliff edge of the dunes was protected by a "rock garden" (a "cage" containing rocks) and we spotted that other walkers have followed a route behind the cage, and we decided to give this a go, though there are signs telling you not to climb on the rock garden, so I suspect we maybe shouldn't have gone this way. Initially it was quite straightforward walking between the rock garden and the dunes above. However, close to the other end, there was a barrier blocking off a collapsed section, so our only options were to go back or to go around. We managed to edge around the barrier; for me this involved going on hands and knees at one point which was not very comfortable because of the marram grass and some thistly plants in the dunes. Thankfully the difficult section was quite short and then we climbed up a sandy path and onto concrete steps and emerged into civilisation; "The Esplanade" at the northern end of Scratby. Lesson to other walkers: believe the tide timetable and only attempt the route along the beach if it is VERY close to low tide.

We followed the The Esplanade through Scratby then, close to the "P" shown on the OS map, where the inland alternative route of the coast path ends, we took a zig-zagging ramp back down to the beach, now getting busy with dog-walkers and children playing. We discovered on the return leg that the official route of the coast path at this point is close to the bottom of the cliff, on the inland side of an erosion-slowing row of large boulders, but I don't like walking too close to cliffs (for safety reasons and also because walking on soft sand is very tiring) so we walked along the harder sand closer to the sea. On the top of the cliff, we could see houses very close to the edge; what a perilous place to live. By the time we walked back this way they'd hung the washing out at one of the houses; an excellent drying spot, especially on a breezy day like today, provided your washing is well pegged to the clothes line, otherwise it could easily end up on the beach below.

Past California Gap, we meandered up into the dunes then down to the coast again until we encountered another section where the sea was lapping at a concrete sea wall, so we walked on the concrete then up above it on a sandy path. Unfortunately the sand included marram grass and my feet became entwined in it and I fell over; fortunately I didn't do any damage and a kind woman walking the other way stopped to make sure I was OK. Fairly soon after this, we took a path up though the dunes to a row of mobile homes. We turned left here and walked along, initially past the mobile homes but then on a track past a (free) car park - useful for next time! - and onto a road which brought us to the Caister Beach Car Park, near the Lifeboat Station. This car park is not free, it costs £1.20 an hour, and for that you get the dubious benefit of toilets...but they were closed! However the path past the toilet block led us to a useful little wall by the beach and we sat here for lunch. Having been a bit damnatory about the car park, I should emphasise that we rather liked Caister beach; the "Explore Norfolk" website describes it as "rather forgotten about" and "in the shadow of the much more popular and lively Great Yarmouth beach", but that is precisely why we liked it!

For the whole of our walk, when within sight of the sea, we'd had good (if difficult to photograph because of the Sun) views to the Scroby Sands Wind Farm, and now we were pretty much at the closest point to the turbines, which are around 2.5 km offshore. To further add to the interest, we watched as the offshore support ship "The Kroonberg", made its way past the wind farm. The other point of interest here is the Caister independent lifeboat station, which houses two lifeboats, the inshore boat "Fred Dyble II" and the all-weather boat "Bernard Matthews II". The latter is currently for sale on eBay(!) because there is a new boat on order for delivery in the autumn. I think there is work going on to prepare the launch facilities for the new boat, and there was a digger at work, but whether that is for the new boat or simply moving sand around I am not clear.

Our return walk to Winterton was, as you can see on the map below, essentially the same as the outward leg, though we took slightly more inland routes on several occasions, staying alongside the mobile homes of the Haven Holiday Park for slightly longer, staying on the gorse-edged path from the northern end of Caister (after walking through another free car park and taking advantage of the open toilet block), and - in the section beneath California Gap where the beach is your only option - taking the path between the cliff and the boulders until we were sure that the rest of the beach was wide enough to allow us to take advantage of the harder sand closer to the sea. Most notably, it won't surprise you to hear that from the "The Esplanade" in Scratby, we remained on the track at the top of the cliff all the way back to Hemsby. From the top of the cliff that the digger was attempting to reinforce, it was were perhaps even more obvious how perilous the situation is; I can't think that this access track will remain open for long. Closer to Hemsby Lifeboat Station, the track has been rerouted because the former route has disappeared into the sea.