Sea Palling Walk

It is my birthday today and we had arranged to meet up with Laura for a walk and picnic lunch. I thought it would be nice to go to the Norfolk coast, which Laura could reach easily from Norwich, and suggested Sea Palling. I'd walked there before (see here) but the others hadn't.

It was cold but sunny when we set out, but as we got to within a couple of miles from the coast we started seeing cars with snow on them coming the other way. By the time we got to our meeting point there was snow lying all over the place! Laura had arrived just before us and said she had just checked the forecast for Sea Palling before setting out."40mph+ winds and heavy snow showers"!

Our planned walk was the 6 mile walk described here, but we ended up going a little further along the coast than intended and cut out the inland loop on the way back. This was our route.

There was a handful of other people on the beach, but for most of our walk we were alone. Here are a few photos...

The car park where we started.

As we headed for the beach, we could see the sea was looking rough (but it would become even rougher later).

Those clouds were heading for us.

This little bird (a dunlin, perhaps?) on one of the sea defence boulders looked cold

When the snow came it was like hail to start with.... and we were walking straight into the wind. Laura put her scarf over her face to stop getting stung.

William too.

Yes there was snow lying on the beach as well as the dunes.

We could scarcely believe it. Someone was out there trying to surf. We watched him for a couple of minutes, but he failed to master any of the waves he tried.

The last people we saw on the beach was a man and his daughter... sledging in the snow on the dunes.

We saw plenty of little beach-nesting birds, as described here, but there were no signs diverting us off the beach. Is this a sanderling in winter plumage?

We could have left the beach here and cut our walk short, but we carried on.

Oh oh. It looks like more snow is coming.

And yes it came.

The sea was starting to splash onto the concrete in places as we came to this ramp for the Cart Gap lifeboat.

It was still snowing as we headed through Eccles-on-Sea, but at least we were going downwind now and the dunes provided some relief from the wind.

We omitted the loop that would have taken us to St Andrew's, Hempstead church.

There were some colourful sights along our way back.

The path was snowy in places.

At last we were back in Sea Palling.

We had our cuppa-soup and pork pie picnic in our cars as the snow came again. I, belatedly, checked the weather forecast. It looks like the snow was due to continue for a while yet.

This was the view through my windscreen.

Well that was pretty amazing and a walk I don't think we will forget! Then it was goodbye to Laura and home for the rest of my birthday celebrations. Thank-you Laura for coming to meet us (and the birthday presents).

You can see more of my photos here on Flickr and more details of our route here on MapMyWalk,