The twin sandy bays of Sugar Sands and Howdiemont Sands are reached down a narrow lane and through a farm. We pay our 50p at an honesty box set into the wall (the money helps maintain nearby Longhoughton church, which dates back to the 11th century). On this calm day, distant wind turbines turn slowly below resting clouds. To the north, we see the broken-toothed outline of Dunstanburgh Castle, to the south the low profile of Coquet Island, grey like a surfaced submarine. We pick our way carefully over wet bladderwrack and green strands of algae heading for Boulmer Bay.
Swallows speed towards us, only jinking away at the last moment, fattening up before their long migration to Africa. The tide is out, the seaweed exposed and there are plenty of insects. The rocks here form elaborate patterns. Ruched and layered, knobbly, scalloped or engrailed, they sweep in frozen eddies around tiny pools containing coloured pebbles. Water from a spring in the low cliff flows wide across a flat slab, a single red poppy flowering at its edge.
I’ve watched the wild meadowland above the cliff change over the past year. It sparkled with cowslips in early June, thousands upon thousands of them, studded here and there by the blue of speedwell. The air trembled with larks in numbers that I remember from the downland of my childhood. By this September day the grass has grown tall, the cowslips’ clumpy heads are full of ripe seed, and knapweed dominates, mostly gone over but still with some purple flowers for bumblebees.
There are sporadic bursts of colour: butter-yellow bird’s foot trefoil, mauve scabious, pink restharrow, soft blue harebell. Mostly the meadow is in seed, cover for grey partridge and food for goldfinches. Seven-spot ladybirds crawl amid this abundance, grasshoppers leap from stem to stem, peacock butterflies and painted ladies move restlessly. From below on the beach I hear the call of an oystercatcher and curlew.
Suddenly above me, there’s a hurried scattering of sparrows as a peregrine dashes over the grassy flats. I’m struck by the wholeness of it all. First, a meadow, then the insects and seeds, then small birds and finally a raptor, all these niche layers made possible by one uncultivated clifftop.
