Shingle Street now has two tidal lagoons. A new lagoon has formed to the north of the original one, close to the cottage known as The Beacon, since I was there in December 2019. At high tide today it was an irregular silver-blue crescent of still water, the mirror surface hiding any sense of its depth. The first lagoon is increasingly filling with mud – dunlin and ringed plovers fed there and it is being colonised by samphire, sea purslane and green algae.
Roy Hammans’s place of ‘solitary contemplation’ was not a place of solitude today (see post 19th August 2019). Visitors staying at holiday cottages opened windows and doors and breakfasted in the welcome autumn sun. Trippers and their dogs trudged across the shingle to the sea. Visitors of another kind, hundreds of house martins, flocked around the Martello tower soaking up the sun and twittering excitedly in a last hurrah before taking off on their mystical trek to Africa.