of sunshine, three very important ingredients for a successful seaside holiday. But there was something missing, something that a large island like Great Britain is famous for and has in abundance. We hadn’t seen any boats! This all changed as soon as we entered the town of Wells Next the Sea. Wells is built on the edge of a natural harbour so it was a great place to see boats, even if it was low tide and they were nearly all beached waiting for the tide to come in.It was great fun walking in between the many types of boat, some lying at a forty five or so degree angle and the two fin variety standing upright as though they were on stilts. Although most of the boats were abandoned, a few had their owners still aboard waiting patiently for the sea to return.
With the tide out, the whole harbour basin was a mixture of sand dunes and puddles of sea water left over from the last high tide. Laura and Ollie were having a great time with the dog jumping in and out of the puddles.
“He’s going to pull me in, the way he’s going” screeched Laura. So we all stood with our cameras ready waiting for just that moment. Laura spoilt our fun by managing to keep upright and out of the water.
Wells town itself is a very pretty historical town with a narrow shopping street s
elling some very tasteful souvenirs. According to a local historian, 41 pubs have at some time or other been registered in Wells. I was beginning to imagine one of the best pub crawls ever, but he then elaborated on the story and told us that most of them are now serving other purposes and he assured us that this also included pubs being renamed. This meant I had to abandon my plan of having t-shirts with “The 41 Wells Pub Stag Party” printed on them.We were staying right on the sea front at a place called Pinewoods Holiday Park. Unlike all the other sites we have stayed on so far in Norfolk, this one had facilities. It had a supermarket, coffee shop, and even a boating lake. All the facilities for the van were on hand, including a tap with a constant supply of fresh water and a drain to take it away once we’d used it. But, at three times the price we had so far been paying, it was certainly a case of getting what you paid for. However it did lack the intimate feel of the smaller sites we had so far visited. What was really nice on the small sites was that everyone was really friendly and seemed to have a genuine interest in us and what we were doing. I’d had long conversations about the “Mission” to travel all the way round the UK and genuinely met some very interesting people. It wasn’t that people on this sight were unfriendly, far from it, but they all seemed to keep themselves to themselves and, apart from the odd brief chat about the dog, never really got into any sort of conversation. However, we couldn’t have had a better location, a 10 minute walk to the right and we were in the town, a 10 minute walk to the left and we were on the beach.
The beach itself was the best we had come across since we started which, considering the excellent beaches we had encountered up to now, this was really saying something. We walked through a Pine forest on to a vast expanse of sandy beach and, with the tide out, it was really something special. The channel to the harbour flowed along the one side and was an ideal place for kids to swim in and, with a bank of sand dunes on the other side of the channel, it had
just about everything a beach lover could want. At high tide there was a the danger of getting stranded on the dunes, but a hooter would sound to let you know when the sea was coming in. So at this point everyone was alerted to quickly head back to the main beach.The beach huts here were amazing, with many of them built on stilts, and a backdrop of the pine forest behind them. If I was ever planning to spend a lot of time here, then one of these beach huts would have to be a must. At £60,000 asking price though, they were not cheap.
Later that afternoon we were back in the harbour. If we had any desires of sitting on the harbour walls, these were quickly dashed as just about every spare space on the wall was occupied by a child with a crab fishing net dangling in the water on the end of a fishing line. The net was baited with a piece of bacon, which apparently the crabs are very fond of. This also explained why just about everu convenience tore and butchers shop was advertising their bacon prices.
“What have you caught” I asked one of the kids, He showed me his bucket with 2 small crabs in it.
“My brother has caught a really big one” He told me, and with that his brother proudly showed me a perfect specimen of Norfolk crab that was about the size of his hand.
It was great to just sit eating fish and chips and watching the tide come in. The first sign of this was the small stream that we previously had to cross to get on to the sand bank, becoming a fast flowing river. Then a slow trickle of water started to tease the boats by tickling their fins. The main entrance to th
e harbour where Ollie had previously enjoyed his swim was now deep enough for the fishing boats to return to base. They came in one after another filled with crates of fresh Norfolk crab. One at a time we saw the boats that were lying on their side on the sand bank slowly start to upright themselves as more water started to flow in. You could
hear boat engines in the harbour start to roar in to life ready to go to sea. All of a sudden the whole area had started to come alive and it seemed a totally different place from the one we came to a couple of hours ago. Where there was calm and quiet, there was now the sounds of boats getting ready for sea, fishing boats being unloaded and boats arriving back after a day out at sea.As this was carnival week there were a number of activities going on in the town. We saw advertised a walk through the town run by a local historian. We thought it would be an interesting way to spend a couple of hours, so we spent our Fiver and off we went. We heard a number of interesting stories of local deeds and misdemeanours perpetrated by the good and not so good people of Wells. The most famous resident, we were told, was a guy named John Field. His claim to fame was that he was the first mate on HMS Bounty who Fletcher Christian replaced on the voyage that became famous for the Mutiny. According to the guide, the infamous Captain Blythe was not as bad a fellow as he is painted by the Hollywood movie and he actually got a lot of bad press. Somehow, though, trying to imagine Captain Blythe as a good guy sort of spoils one of my favourite stories.
