Coastwalk

Sutton Bridge → Gedney Drove End

Distance: 5.01 miles
Ascent: unknown
Duration: 1 hour 29 minutes

Vanishing point
« King's Lynn | Holbeach St Matthew »

The path from Sutton Bridge to Fosdyke Bridge is twenty miles long. There are no regular bus-services to intermediate points, and my memories of the walk to Sutton Bridge aren't happy ones. How to safely and enjoyably cover the distance has had me stumped - until this week when I decided to break it into three or four circular walks. Today's walk was the first.

This all makes a change for me. Usually I get the bus back to the car; today I walked. Usually I overdo it on the first day of a week off; today I walked a total of ten miles.

From the village of Sutton Bridge the path follows the River Nene to the rather improbable port. (A port? In a small village? Up a narrow river?) The Nene is dead straight here, the lines of each bank converging on a vanishing point beyond which lay my destination.

I stopped just short of my planned turnaround point. The wind has been coming in hard from the south-west all day and I knew I'd be walking into it on the way back. (And it's a fierce wind. A long-grass-combing, daffodil-slaying, tree-across-the-road, 45-degree-leaning wind.)

The daffodils have been the surprise feature of the day. When they were on the horizon I thought them to be a field of oil-seed rape; I just didn't expect to see flowers farmed. (Don't ask where I thought flowers came from.) And presumably as an effect of previous years' winds, the yellow bloom has cropped up everywhere. Almost every patch of grass has at least a couple of clusters of gold.

Tomorrow - if the wind has died down some - it's more of the same. And if you're wondering, no this isn't the walk I was looking forward to. It's a useful stopping-off place en route.