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The Norfolk Coast

'What a coast this is, with its salt marshes and lavender, its channels, dunes, bays and crumbling Ice Age cliffs, lonelier and wilder than its Suffolk neighbour, Arctic, melancholic, beautiful, treacherous, with sandbanks and quicksands, storms and floods, and never-ending erosion.'

Peter Sagar


The Norfolk coast consists of nearly 100 miles of spectacular landscape: from soft, sandy cliffs to salt-marshes and shingle banks.

Gorleston Beach

Gorleston Beach

Overstrand Beach

Overstrand Beach

Starting at Hopton, just south of Great Yarmouth, it sweeps northwards embracing many popular seaside resorts such as Winterton, Happisburgh, Mundesley, Cromer, Sheringham and Holkham. It comes to an end at King's Lynn - where it merges into Lincolnshire.

Caravan at Happisburgh

Caravan at Happisburgh

Much of the Norfolk coast is threatened by coastal erosion - especially at locations such as Happisburgh where the soft cliffs are continually being undermined. Waves at high tide erode the foot of the cliff causing the face to weaken and slip. At the next high tide, the collapsed material is removed and the process begins again.

Sea Defences at Happisburgh

Sea Defences at Happisburgh

The 12th century church of St. Mary's at Happisburgh is perched perilously close to the cliff edge and may, one day, suffer the same fate as St. Mary's Church at nearby Eccles. (Eccles-on-Sea is often referred to, in a typically humorous Norfolk fashion, as Eccles-in-the-Sea.)

Over the centuries the Norfolk coast has inspired many writers including: Daniel Defoe, Clement Scott, A. C. Swinburne, John Betjeman, Anthony Thwaite, George Barker and Kevin Crossley-Holland. Defoe used the treacherous coast off Winterton as the location for Robinson Crusoe's shipwreck. Crossley-Holland has successfully captured the muddy creeks and saltmarshes of Burnham Overy Staithe in his collection Waterslain, while John Betjeman recalled childhood holidays at Horsey in East Anglian Bathe.

Striped Cliffs at Hunstanton

Cliffs at Hunstanton

L.P. Hartley used the famous layered cliffs at Hunstanton as the backdrop for some of the scenes in his novel The Shrimp and the Anemone.

The ever changing interplay of light between the sea, the sky and the land has made the Norfolk coast an inspirational place for poets, photographers and artists alike. There is also the inescapable sense of being on the edge of something. The nature writer Richard Mabey described Norfolk's appeal as 'the closeness of these unstable edges'  where, to him, the 'world seems to be all possibility'.

Here is a lovely poem by Frances Cornford entitled: The Coast: Norfolk which captures something of the beauty and bleakness of the county's coastline. Cornford was one of Philip Larkin's favourite poets.
 

As on the highway's quiet edge
He mows the grass beside the hedge,
The old man has for company
The distant, grey, salt-smelling sea,
A poppied field, a cow and calf,
The finches on the telegraph.

Across his faded back a hone,
He slowly, slowly scythes alone
In silence of the wind-soft air,
With ladies' bedstraw everywhere,
With whitened corn, and tarry poles,
And far-off gulls like risen souls.


Other poems inspired by the Norfolk coast include:

1) A Haven by A.C. Swinburne (Cromer)

2) Salthouse by Charles Bennett

3) Eccles by Anthony Thwaite

4) Dusk, Burnham Overy Staithe by Kevin Crossley-Holland

5) In Memory of David Archer by George Barker (Overstrand)

6) Thoughts at Happisburgh by Joan Barton

7) The Garden of Sleep by Clement Scott

8) The Deserted Church Tower on Sidestrand Cliff by R.H. Mottram

9) King's Lynn by R.N. Curry

10) On A Friend's Escape from Drowning Off the Norfolk Coast by George Barker (Cromer)


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