Seven Natural Wonders

Norfolk’s dynamic coast and countryside has been shaped over millions of years. Did you know a terminal moraine created the highest point in East Anglia and longshore drift made the home of the largest seal colony in the country? And let’s not forget the importance of flint and chalk. Here are the seven natural wonders of Norfolk…

1 BLAKENEY POINT AND ITS WILDLIFE

Managed by the National Trust since 1912 and within the North Norfolk Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Blakeney Point is a 4-mile spit of flint-derived shingle and sand dunes, created by longshore drift across the River Glaven.

Designated as Blakeney National Nature Reserve, the area includes tidal mudflats, salt marshes and reclaimed farmland, known as Blakeney Freshes, as well as a host of wildlife. It is an import site for breeding birds, especially Sandwich, common and little terns, migrating birds in the Autumn and Winter, a favourable spot for samphire, or sea asparagus, and is home to the largest seal colony in England, with over 1000 Grey seals and pups on the shoreline in Winter.

The best way to visit the seals is by boat from the quays at Morston and Blakeney so you can get close to the inquisitive mammals without disturbing them. Boats go at high tide once a day in the Winter and often twice a day in the Summer, sometimes allowing passengers to go ashore.

2 THE BRECKS

Described by Charles Dickens as ‘barren’ in David Copperfield, and by an observer in the 1760s as ‘sand, and scattered gravel, without the least vegetation; a mere African desert’, the Brecks looks very different now to most of its history. The word Breck is medieval, meaning an area of sandy heathland and gorse that was broken up for farmland and then allowed to revert to wilderness once the soil was exhausted. Sand storms were a regular occurrence in centuries past. The Brecks are home to unique Pingo lakes, caused by collapsing dome-shaped mounds of soil covering a large core of ice, and Deal Rows, single rows of Scots pine trees originally planted as hedges which, untended, have grown out and now exhibit twisting and contortion. They are the most distinctive feature of the Brecks landscape and give the impression of acacia trees on the African savannah.

The creation of the Scots pine Thetford Forest in 1914 helped make better soil, and modern farming methods mean the free-draining soil is perfect for rearing pigs and growing onions. Corsican pine was added later, for its resistance to diseases and pests, tolerance of thin soil and high volume of timber. There are also narrow roadside fire-control belts of hardwood oak, red oak, beech, lime, walnut and maple. An eerie, dimpled lunar landscape marks the only Neolithic flint mine in Britain that’s open to the public. Grimes Graves, the oldest industrial site in Europe, was worked for around 1000 years from 3000BC to 1900BC and today you can see the depressions in the ground created by 400 pits. Visitors can climb 30 feet down through the chalk surface in one shaft to see the jet-black flint that was used for making axes and starting fires.

3 FLINT

Flint is an inescapable and indelible part of Norfolk’s history and landscape. Found naturally in chalk, with layers in various shapes and sizes, flint is almost pure silica, but any impurities give different colours: brown field flints eroded from the chalk around Fakenham; black flint around Thetford and Swaffham; chalk-covered grey flints north of North Walsham; light grey around Holt; rounded beach flints near Wells-next-the-Sea, Sheringham and Cromer.

Norfolk has become famous for its evidence of early human occupation. Among the finds have been a selection of black flint tools left behind 60,000 years ago near Lynford, in the Brecks, where flint tools were found with mammoth bones. Likewise, a 500,000-year-old flint axe was found at Happisburgh on Norfolk’s Deep History Coast. 4,500 years ago Neolithic people were mining flint from the chalk 57 feet below ground at Grimes Graves near Thetford, where there are more than 400 digs – this is one of Europe’s earliest industrial centres and a unique source of hard black flint.

4 BRITAIN’S GREAT BARRIER REEF

Dubbed ‘Britain’s Great Barrier Reef’ the Cromer Shoals Chalk Bed, created when dinosaurs ruled the earth, has been found to be the longest in the world – and it’s so close to the shore you could skim a stone out to it.

At over 20 miles long, the 100-million-year-old reef is oneand-a-half times longer than the Thanet Coast chalk reef in Kent, the former record holder.

Discovered less than ten years ago, the reef is just 25ft under the sea’s surface and has now been made a Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. With an area of 315sq km it’s larger than the Broads National Park.

And it’s part of the chalk seam that stretches across England and includes the White Cliffs of Dover and the White Horse Hill Carvings in Wiltshire.

5 DEEP HISTORY COAST/ CROMER FOREST BED

The Cromer Forest Bed Formation, aged between 500,000 and 2 million-years-old and stretching from Weybourne on the north Norfolk coast to Kessingland in north Suffolk, is rich in fossils, including the 650,000-year-old West Runton Mammoth, a 500,000 year old flint axe and the 850,000 year old footprints of early man – the first humans to enter Britain. This area is called the Deep History Coast because it has pushed back archaeologists’ understanding hundreds of thousands of years and also because, like Deep Space, we don’t yet know what else might be out there.

Much of the Forest Bed is now obscured by coastal defences, but in some areas it continues to be eroded, revealing more fossils, such as mammal bones and teeth, jaw bones and deer antlers. If you know what you’re looking for, you might even find a mammoth tooth on the shoreline.

6 RIVER WENSUM

In the country’s driest and flattest county you’ll find a series of springfed chalk rivers that are a fertile home for birds, plants, insects, mammals and fish. They rise in woods and water meadows, the chalk made of billions upon billions of microscopic, single cell sea creatures called coccoliths.

There are only 210 chalk streams in the world, 160 of which are in the UK, and most of the lowland ones are to be found in Norfolk.

Chalk streams in Norfolk include the Rivers Bure, Glaven, Stiffkey, Burn, Heacham, Ingol, Hun, Babingley and Gaywood, but the longest, biggest and most significant is the River Wensum, the most protected river in Europe – it has Site of Special Scientific Interest and Special Area of Conservation status for its entire length. The Wensum has its source between the villages of Colkirk and Whissonsett, flows through Fakenham and the Pensthorpe Nature Reserve, through Swanton Morley, Taverham and Norwich, before meeting the River Yare at Whitlingham.

7 CROMER RIDGE

You do wonder if Noel Coward had ever visited the county when he wrote in his play Private Lives: ‘Very flat, Norfolk’. Anyone who has walked or cycled on the Cromer Ridge will know otherwise!

The ridge is the highest area of East Anglia at over 100 metres, is 8.7 miles long, with the tallest point behind West Runton at Beacon Hill, otherwise known as Roman Camp. When the ice age was at its zenith, one third of the world was covered in ice and much of Great Britain was hidden under vast glaciers. The glaciers and ice sheets moved huge amounts of debris, ranging from boulders to fine rock particles, and as the ice melted this rock debris, known as till or boulder clay, was deposited, forming new landscapes. That’s how the Cromer ridge came to be – the result of a terminal moraine, the furthest advance of a glacier before it lost momentum and the material dredged up from what is now the North Sea poured out to form what we see today.