As we walk northwards from the fishing village of Boulmer, the beach is heaped with waist-deep piles of seaweed. There must have been a recent storm to have thrown up so much debris. A nimble robin picks off tiny insects from this new feast. Sanderlings skitter along on speedy legs, feeding as they go. The waves have deposited large grey boulders, as yet smooth and uncolonised by limpets.
Though there’s a cold wind snagging at our clothes, the far-off edge of today’s low tide is lacy and calm. Birds feed across the wide area of exposed rocks and pools: a hunched heron waiting sharp-eyed; cormorants the colour of Whitby jet; vibrant oystercatchers, strikingly black and white. Redshanks strut on bright legs, delving with their black-tipped red beaks. Turnstones work fast, head-butting bladderwrack to snap up crustaceans and molluscs. In a shallow inlet, there are drifts of rusty-headed wigeon. Black-tailed godwits probe wet muddy sand with long bills, their bodies slender and elegant on thin legs. There is motion everywhere we look.
The distant sandy-coloured walls of Dunstanburgh Castle are lit by pale sunlight, a ragged wedge sticking out into the North Sea. We meet no other walkers all the way to Howick Haven. The low cliffs around this sheltered bay are topped in a scrub of gorse and bramble. A black redstart perches briefly on a dock seedhead before dropping into long grass, searching for insects or spiders perhaps. In the calm water of the Haven there’s a small raft of goldeneye.
Below the north-facing cliff, fresh water bubbles out of level rock to flow away down a narrow channel to the sea. Grainy sand is being churned around in this small erupting cauldron. With its feeling of magic, I’d like to think it was a natural spring. It was, in fact, a geological experiment, an artesian borehole drilled in the 1960s by a team from Newcastle University to prove the succession of strata. Though I know its story, it still seems otherworldly, a feeling amplified by the fluting cry of a curlew as it takes flight over our heads.
• Susie White is one of several country diarists who have contributed to Red Sixty Seven, a book about Britain’s most vulnerable birds published on 14 February (British Trust for Ornithology)
