Overy Harbour

....looking across to Scolt Head island (on the left) and East Head (on the right).

I love this view. It's usually a summer view for me as I walk bare foot across the marsh to the island at low tide. In years gone by there was always the Boxing Day walk round the island. They have gone with passage of time now but I enjoyed a lovely walk out before the next migration from London arrives.

There were various things I should have been doing at the house but I opted for this instead. I knew there would be great flocks of over wintering folk at Holkham and on Overy bank so I took myself across the marsh. Not too many walkers, the Boxing Day shoot was delivering carnage somewhere across the fields in the distance, there were a few large groups who passed noisily by and then I caught up with one poor chap who I could see had just turned round and given up, picking his way over the wet ground he only had a pair of trainers on. There was only one more bad bit before he would get the view across the harbour so I did the gender reversal Walter Raleigh thing and helped him across the muddy pond so that he would get up onto the bank.

Once on the marsh it was bliss. The light. The wind. The calls of a myriad of waders, and of course, the geese who were playing a good game with me. I could hear them and then saw vast clouds of them in the distance, and then they would disappear. I stood for ages and persuaded myself I was looking at a bouy on the sandbank, until it moved. It was the first seal sighting. And then there was so much splashing in the channel I thought it must be a bonkers swimmer, or a travelling kelpie. But it was two more seals. As the light shone across the reed beds I could see a low flying hunter, a barn owl? A marsh harrier? No way of knowing as it quartered into the low sun.

(Extra...who says I can't do seasonal?! Just put this together before the laal'uns arrive)