Somme Bay

The flats stretch so wide the horizon bends. At low tide the sea withdraws for kilometres and the mud becomes a landscape — samphire underfoot, seals hauled out on the distant sandbanks, the sky doubled in the wet sand. The Somme Bay is an estuary in northern France where the scale is measured in emptiness, the wildlife in concentration and the light in the silver-grey particular to the Picardy coast.

The Baie de Somme is among the largest estuaries of northern France, a bay that empties at low water into mudflats, salt marsh and sandbanks between Le Crotoy on the north shore and Saint-Valery-sur-Somme on the south. Harbour seals — the largest colony in France — and grey seals rest on the banks at low tide and are watched from a distance on guided walks across the sands, which is the only safe way out onto them: the tide comes back faster than a walker. The Parc du Marquenterre on the northern side is one of the country's finest bird reserves, spoonbills and avocets and storks among the hundreds of species that pass through, and the heritage railway of the Baie de Somme runs its steam trains round the shore between the two towns. The samphire that grows on the flats is cut in summer and served in the restaurants with the lamb that grazes the salt meadows.