Blakeney Point

A shingle spit reaches four miles into the North Sea, colonised by grey seals that haul out on the sand in their hundreds beneath skies so wide the clouds seem to start at your feet. Blakeney Point is a nature reserve on the rim of England — a place where land and sea negotiate their boundary twice a day.

Blakeney Point, a National Trust reserve, hosts one of England's largest grey seal breeding colonies — thousands of pups are born on the sand each winter — and seasonal boat trips from Morston Quay and Blakeney Harbour pass close enough to smell the colony before landing near the Point's tip. Terns crowd the spit in summer — Arctic, Sandwich and little terns thickening the air with wings — and Brent geese arrive each autumn from Arctic Russia to graze the marsh. The determined can walk the four miles of shingle from Cley Beach instead, an honest slog with the sea on one side and sea-lavender marsh on the other, purple in summer. Blakeney village itself, once a serious medieval port, keeps its flint-and-brick lanes and a harbour that dries completely at low tide, boats stranded on the shining mud.