Norfolk: King's Lynn to Snettisham Beach 6/7/2008**

 

King's Lynn docks   Twiggy mullein, Snettisham   Shelduck

In King’s Lynn, we walked north along the “Heritage Trail”, past the C19th Corn Exchange, around the Tuesday Market Place and St Nicholas’ Chapel, with its C15th roof, up St Anne’s Street past True’s Yard and its old restored fishermen’s cottages, and finally into North Street leading to the main Hunstanton Road.  This took us to a side street along the north side of the docks, where there was a strong smell of fish and a mess of boats, nets and rigging, and on to the path leading up the east bank of the Great Ouse.  We kept along the bottom of the embankment along a narrow path, where our feet got very wet from the rain and the long grass, but we at least had our last chance to record saltmarsh vegetation before we left the Wash.  Under a piece of drift board we discovered a common lizard.  At the end of the path we looked for a way of continuing along embankments, but there was no public footpath, the coming stretch of land for several miles being part of the Sandringham Estate.  We met a local farmer who refused permission to go across his land and were forced to retreat to King’s Lynn.  We therefore took our car to Castle Rising, about as far north as we had arrived along the Great Ouse, but 7km inland from the coast, the nearest we could get.  From here we walked the bit of old Hunstanton Road that had been by-passed by the modern A149, over the Babingley River and along a walking and cycle track beside the A149.  After a little way this track crossed the road to head for Sandringham and we were forced to continue along the trunk road itself, where there was little verge, for almost a mile.  Passing the flattened carcases of squirrels and amphibians we wondered if we would be next.  We turned off west back towards the coast when the road to Wolferton came, to our great relief.  Along here a sandy verge had small cudweed and heather, but largely we were passing through boring pine and rhododendron plantations of which the Crown Estate seems over-fond.  The village itself was a collection of well-maintained houses, including some that incorporate the disused railway station that used to serve Sandringham.  We assumed these beautiful houses are used for servants of the royal estate.  From here we took a private road north to the pumping station, past a remote collection of barns, where we were made to jump by a bird-scarer firing just as we passed.  It was ironic that these bird-scarers sought to keep birds off the fields adjacent to a large RSPB reserve, Snettisham Marsh.  We reached this reserve along a bit of fairly unkempt embankment. There was a flock of greylag geese that presumably the farmers are keen to keep off their crops.  There were also breeding black-headed gulls.  The only bit of official footpath in this area was supposed to cross the mile-long pool behind the beach here, but this was fenced off!  We found that a path at the bottom of the embankment, however, eventually led to a new crossing of the water and the top of the shingle beach where, despite continuing rain, it was refreshing to see the variety of colour in the plants here – abundant yellow-horned poppy, viper’s bugloss, musk thistle, white stonecrop, dwarf mallow, sticky storksbill, carline thistle and, unusually, fine-leaved sandwort.  These delighted us all the rest of the way to Snettisham Beach. where there was a good range of shells along the high-tide line.  A row of chalets were sheltering just landward of the shingle ridge, and below a fenced off portion of beach-head where birds bred, although the latter seemed all to have left by now, as the young oystercatchers were busily searching the offshore mud with their parents.  Further out on the mudflats were many shelduck.  Near the chalets there were escaped plants like fennel, Watling Street thistle and Chilean iris.  At the beach car park were lots of twiggy mulleins, a distinctive plant largely restricted to East Anglia.  We walked up the road a little way beside the caravan park of Shepherds Port, until we found a bar where we could get some local taxi numbers.