Day 5: Hunstanton to Brancaster

Weather: Wet and windy to start, then just windy

Distance covered today: 17.2km ( 10.7mi)

Last night's B&B: The Bays Guest House

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 62.7 %: 102.3 km

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 5 (click!)

There is something elemental about reaching the seaside!  Not perhaps for everyone, but certainly there is for those of us who spent their youth far inland and only saw the coast on holiday.  “Are we there yet??” literally rang out repeatedly in our little convoys as we headed hundreds of miles for the coast. I have never forgotten the excitement of those adventures, nor the sadness of the long trek home.  After my somewhat lacklustre crossing of the Norfolk agricultural plains, my spirits were lifted by the thought of a coastal walk, but much more so by the thought of meeting a good friend of almost 40 years standing, and his elder son.  Our paths have been separated by geography and circumstance, but as always, those bonds formed in the fire of youth prevail through all challenge. Words are seldom necessary to reinforce these bonds, though in my case you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

I talked my head off!! 

I always do when I have a captive audience and I am unusually excited.  Richard, Vivian’s son, may easily be forgiven for wondering about his father’s taste in friends!  There were times when he seemed to have to take himself off into the middle distance to escape the incessant plethora of inanity!  Veronica knows what he was experiencing!  Let that be a warning to those of you who might, incredibly, be considering walking with me at some time in the future!

Probably more in self-defence than in any hope of educating his interlocutor, Richard had some very interesting things to say about modern music.  It was the first time I have ever been exposed to these ideas, and while Richard will have to try a whole harder to get me to like it, he was fascinating in his explanations. He used to play base in a band and, now that he is at university, he is looking at options to take it further. His current interest is “mathcore” music, which is, for those of you who are new to the genre, a sub-genre of metalcore.  Metalcore is itself a combination of extreme metal and hardcore punk, and I am now lost. Apparently this is also a progression from death metal, and Richard was going on about dissonance and rhythmical complexity, but he could see the pointlessness of his artistic explanations and was undoubtedly merely being polite.

Adjusting the complexity of his argument to the pathetic level of his audience, he was able to explain something to me that I could understand and that was completely new to me. I have always been reluctant in the extreme to see any value in hip-hop, and have understood nothing about it!  He explained that in traditional pop music, the melody is generally carried by the vocal lyrics, while the rhythm is carried by the backing instruments. In hip-hop, the opposite is true. The music is in the instrumentation, while the vocals carry the rhythm.  How on earth have I never noticed that very obvious point!!

He also spoke knowledgeably about racism and misogyny in hip-hop and explained that in reality it was no worse than in many other genres. Who am I to argue?

At one point, as I listened to his slightly self-effacing, but principled, logical and passionately held views on some subject or other, I turned to see his father looking on respectfully and benevolently, and I was caused to remember conversations of precisely the same ilk, just one generation earlier, in Vivian’s father’s house, before he died. Like father, like son. It was a very special moment.

Coastal scenery provided a welcome backdrop to all this intensity, and after the uniformity of the Peddars Way, the change was welcome.  Our path took us through a well-known bird-life nature reserve, where unfortunately, we just didn’t have the time to appreciate it, and on into the hinterland, where we were lucky to spot hares galloping (how do hares run?) through the newly sown fields.  We passed through chocolate-box villages, almost as attractive as in the Cotswolds, all of them with churches incredibly dominant for the size of the surrounding village.  The question remains; were the villages larger in times past, or was religion just so important that these simple villagers would dedicate so much of their surplus labour to their faith?  For me, both explanations are possible.  

That said, walking today with my old friend Vivian, a hugely competent historian, I was sadly caused again to reflect that the vivid imagination that so often populates these blogs in an effort to make sense of the incomprehensible is no substitute for the hard grind and rigour of the academic method.

 Be warned, though!  I am unlikely to change!

Tacky post-Victorian seaside amenities. We had a drink here!

  

But further on, delights so typical of the British seaside 

The geology on the other hand is spectacular! All this rock is sedimentary. The lower level is good old Carstone, the rock from which many of the houses in the area are made, and the colour is caused by the highly oxidised iron content. The very red rock just below the white chalk is the famous Hunstanton Formation, which was deposited as sea levels rose, presumably with an even higher deposition of iron. On top of this, the white chalk is visible, a limestone composed of decomposed marine life, so typical of British shores and downs. The sea is increasingly eroding these cliffs as the climate changes. It keeps the colours fresh!! (not a politically correct view!)

A view cross The Wash to Lincolnshire

A southerly wind whips up the sand on an otherwise tranquil beach

Green sea-grass on the rocks at low tide

Seaside formal gardening. Not quite the natural world, but OK in its place

A fountain to The Wash!!

Spring planting at the seaside!

At last we were on a lonely beach. More my style!

Vivian and I holding up the post that is the end of Peddars Way and the start of the Norfolk Coastal Path. It's complicated, because there was some back-tracking to Hunstanton, but trust me, we are now on the Coastal Path and approximately half-way on the trail!

Richard and Vivian

The nature reserve we didn't get to see. Naughty us!

This path is on top of a high sea-defence barrier. It's hard to appreciate the scale of the downward slopes at each edge in a photo, but these barriers allow the sea to inundate on one side to create salt marshes, while protecting fauna, flora and human habitation on the leeward side. The argument is always about where to locate these barriers! 

We headed inland and were lucky to spot these hares haring! I'm proud of me and my camera for catching them at full zoom!

The "Old School", now inevitably a larney private residence. But what a beautiful building for a school!