A waft of smoky eel or cod or something from the smokehouse drifted through the car window as I drove through the narrow, right-angled, main street of Cley-Next-The-Sea. The early autumn sunshine meant the tourists examining the expensive art and pottery shops stared blankly from behind their shades. Cars – the bane of many such towns but also the leveller that means most people today can get to these places – choked the picturesque village; queuing up to give way to the Coasthopper bus, but on such a day, in such a place, there was no hint of impatience. Once through the gridlock the road widened again, and a couple of hundred yards east of the village I turned left towards the beach. Parking the car amongst the anoraked birdwatchers, I paid my £2 to the man in the little shed, got the dog out of the back, and set off along the shingle toward Blakeney Point.
The North Norfolk coast road leads you through gem after gem of fishing villages, bird reserves and beaches; a jewel-studded tiara atop the curve of the East Anglian coast. This part of the North Norfolk coast is characterised by the type of shingle beach that stretches eastward from Blakeney Point. There's deep water here, and unlike the beaches of Holkham and Burnham Overy Staithe, which at low tide allow you to walk for seemingly miles from the shore, there is none of the soft white sand and towering house-high dunes. The shingle bank slopes quite steeply in a series of steps on the seaward side, while on the landward it eases gently down to meet the marshes, and serves to prevent the sea from encroaching too far on our domain. The marshes behind the bank are a superb environment for all wildlife, but it is the birdlife that is the main draw: waders of all descriptions, the elusive bittern, and the charismatic marsh harriers, whose springtime courtship dances on air are a wonderful spectacle.
As I leave the car park there are four boats drawn up on the top level of the shingle bank, lending a certain poignancy to the view. From my lowly position on the marsh side of the shingle bank there's sky, there's shingle, and the white of the boats punctuating the scene like a row of full stops between the land and sea. This poignancy epitomises a lot of the East Anglian coast for me; there's a sense of wildness and, somehow, of isolation. Even though you're never far from a blazing pub fire, or a decent meal, particularly in winter this coastline has the ability to make you feel far from civilisation; when the pinkfooted geese come flooding over in their thousands below the glowing embers of one of East Anglia's incomparable sunsets, with their characteristic honking ringing in your ears, the cold tundra where they spend the rest of the year doesn't seem so far away. It's a wildfowler's heaven as well as a twitcher's, and on a winter's evening you can imagine them skulking in the many creeks and gullies waiting, often forlornly, for the chance of a shot at a stray goose or duck.
The dog tears off ahead of me, nose to the ground, disappearing amongst the clumps of marram grass, putting up a pair of mallard that were on the marsh fringe, rolling ecstatically on a dead rat, generally doing what terriers do. I follow somewhat more slowly; the large stones of the shingle here can make for tiring going, but the sea is in my nostrils and the low, flat view over the marshes to my left finishes with the lighthouse and the flinty jumble of cottages that is Cley. Further along stands Blakeney, its church visible on the horizon, behind which stretches out the rolling Norfolk countryside, and the Kelling and Holkham estates. Through this countryside the chalk streams that I have come to explore, the Glaven, and further west the Stiffkey and the Burn, flow towards me from their sources inland.
I head up onto the highest part of the shingle, and now I have a view out to sea as well as inland. From this beach in the summer months the mackerelers send their feathers as far out towards the Arctic Circle as they can. Then they pump and wind furiously back towards them, and the mackerel hopefully follow, snatching and grabbing at the shine and glitter of the feathers on the set of six hooks. A string of six fish on one cast is not uncommon, yet this year (2009) the North Norfolk coast seems to have been sadly lacking in that most beautiful of fish. On the three or four occasions I have been here in the summer months with my lure rod hoping to waylay one of the large bass that follow the mackerel shoals, which in turn follow the whitebait, there has been a collective shaking of heads amongst the mackerel fishermen. Back in the car park old salts could be heard muttering that maybe in another couple of weeks they would start to show; the problem was that they were still saying that two weeks later, and two weeks after that. On one occasion I counted over forty rods along the beach; I didn't see a single fish caught, and of all the mackerelers I spoke to, none of them had caught, and none of them had seen anyone else catch. The mackerel is one of the most beautiful fish that swim in our waters; when you see one fresh from the sea it doesn't seem possible that such an ordinary, run-of-the-mill fish can be so eye-catchingly gaudy. The emerald greens, silvers, blues, purples, pinks – you name a colour the mackerel seems to have it – combine into a shimmering, sharp-toothed miracle of a fish; what you get on a supermarket fish-counter bears almost no relation to what these fish are like when you've just caught them, and that includes how they taste. I never used to like mackerel until I tasted one cooked within an hour of being caught, but now I'm most definitely a convert. Who knows why the mackerel didn't put in an appearance this year? There were rumblings about trawlers, foreign of course, but that surely can't be anything new; global warming was mentioned too. Perhaps we'll never know and, hopefully, next year they will return to the shore and this year will become just one of those things; if you're a fisherman you'll know exactly what I mean.
After about half to three-quarters of a mile I come across what I've been looking for: the channel that finally delivers the Glaven to the sea. Or what used to be the channel that delivered the Glaven to the sea. Now there's an Environment Agency sign-post stating that this is the site of the river Glaven channel in-filling works. It carries a helpful picture of heavy plant machinery carrying out the work, while at the same time another sign-post tells me I can't cross what used to be the Glaven channel due to dangerously soft mud! I ignore it, figuring if it can support the weight of a JCB it can support the weight of little old me. There's not really much to see, just the stones used to fill it in, and a trickle of water emptying into a creek. I continue across the marsh back towards Cley until I come across the new Glaven channel. It's probably much the same as the old one was, but even so it seems to epitomise the assault that our chalk streams have been under and, it seems, still are. There's the hulk of an old fishing boat stranded high on the marsh, now browned with rust; it's a poignant scar on the landscape and I come over all philosophical: man's influence won't last forever, but we'll probably have destroyed any natural beauty by the time forever gets here anyway.
Having driven back through the village the coast road carries me over the Glaven outfall sluice; I park in a small, sloping gravel area on the right of the road, and cross over to follow the river inland from the sluice. A wonderfully quirky Norfolk sign declares that this is "Stanroom's Marsh,” and in an unusually friendly manner for a sign-post - especially considering the ones I was recently examining - that "All fishmen” are welcome, and even though I don't have gills I pass smiling underneath it. It's almost bewildering to find such a sign in our countryside; it seems littered with so many "Private Fishing,” or "Strictly Private, No Trespassing,” signs that still I find myself glancing backwards towards the road, expecting at any moment an indignant "Oi! What do you think you're doing?”
With me I have my eight foot lure rod that I usually use for bass fishing; I'm hoping it will be more successful on these brackish-water pike than it has been on the bass this summer. I know there are pike here: I've seen a programme with famous Norfolk angler John Bailey fishing in the very swim I'm going to start in (http://www.horseandcountry.tv/episode/fly-john-bailey-episode-4). He was after sea-trout with a fly rod, but a pike was his prize, so this won't be a total chuck it and chance it session.
Looking back toward the road the mouth of the sluice that marks the front line in the battle between the land and the sea that is raging all along this coastline is a dark slit of inky blackness from where I'm Iooking; it could quite easily hold a whole host of trolls. I'm hoping for a fairytale of my own today, a twenty pounder perhaps? But, alas, it is not to be, and after an hour or so of casting various lures, whether they floated, dived, wiggled, sank, or sat there begging to be eaten made no difference, and I packed up fishless, returned to the car and set off inland towards Wiveton and Glandford to see how close I could get to the river Glaven away from the shoreline.
