solitude

One of the great accolades of life, albeit usually bestowed posthumously, is to have a footpath dedicated to you. Wainwright, of course, has a lot in the Lake District. The engineer of the old MGN railway company had bestowed in his memory the cycleway from Aylsham to Norwich - Marriott’s Way. And the name (and maybe the ghost) of Sir Peter Scott, the naturalist, artist and general all-round good egg, accompanied us as we walked along the eponymous path around the south banks of the Wash.


One end of the walk is in Lincolnshire, at the faux lighthouse near to where the River Nene debouches to the Wash. Sir Peter once lived here. Perhaps this east bank lighthouse was the inspiration for him to turn apostate and abandon his habit of firing punt guns at geese in favour of portraying them on canvas. A Peter Scott is now famously a generic term for paintings of skeins of geese over bleak marshland. Certainly he was here when he set about establishing sanctuaries for the creatures. I find a certain irony about this conversion on the road to Sutton Bridge. In those days, geese were prolific; they were everywhere on the marsh. Now, most have gone. Numbers have dwindled, despite the efforts of conservationists. What moral about human intervention in nature can we draw from this?

Norfolk plays host to the other end of the trail, about 11 miles to the west, more or less at the landing stage for the little aluminium ferry which plies a dour passenger trade between West Lynn and King’s Lynn’s town centre. From a distance, the boat looks like a sampan crawling across a Chinese harbour, if we disregard the grey murky water. Some five hours after leaving the lighthouse we took our seats on the ferry, grateful to find somewhere to sit after an eleven-mile walk beneath breezy and louring skies.

In between, we’d trudged in solitude along the grassy tops of the earthen sea wall. To our left, a broad expanse of marsh, hatched with small gullies and muddy creeks. From the foot of the wall stretched a swathe of wrack of dried seaweed mingled with plastic jetsam of uncaring coaster skippers. That the wrack reaches the wall is testament to the sea’s determination not to abdicate entirely its claim on what was once rightfully shared territory. The wall is a sea defence, keeping the tide at bay for the moment so the marsh barons can continue to build their fortunes before the next (alleged) inundation because of global warming.

Inside the sea embankment is prime agricultural land, glistening brown soil being ploughed and prepared for the next crop. Don’t believe other writers when they talk about prairies – these are large arable fields, true, but the area is not devoid of trees or hedgerows. Even cows have appeared in recent years, probably to allow farmers to utilise the sea bank for grazing. Farming here is organised and professional and bland.

The skies are paramount here. They form a vast 360 degrees dome; the sea and the land share the same altitude of more or less zero metres. With the flatness of the land, and the smooth calm of the distant sea, the impression of vaulted space is unavoidable. Even RAF pilots love these skies. They visit regularly to practise dropping bombs on a nonchalant and completely tolerant common seal colony that’s been nearby for many years.

We chose the wrong day for the walk. My photographs look dull, flat and devoid of colour. But if the day had been better, we’d perhaps not have been in such splendid isolation. Apart from a couple of bait diggers squelching muddily off the marsh and two dog walkers returning to their car, we met nobody for the entire 11 miles.