After the flood

Just a week ago the Norfolk coast looked much as it had done for as long as many can remember. The storm surge on Thursday night has changed things. Not just in the physical and emotional damage wrought in the communities along the coast but also in the way we think and feel about the place.

Given the ease of recording and publishing images and thoughts there has inevitably been much posted about what happened and what it looks like. Two in particular caught my attention; firstly Paul Macro, a Norfolk photographer who posted a collection of images of the aftermath which sums up the wider impact of the event and another by friend - and also a photographer  - Janice Alamanou, who wrote about it from her home in Wells-next-the-Sea.

Closer to home, Burnham Overy was badly hit with homes and businesses being wrecked. The bank between Overy and Wells held but the stretch between Overy and Deepdale was breached in a number of places. Friends in Burnham Norton now find they have seaviews rather than the freshwater marsh they have been accustomed to, a pattern repeated along the coast particularly between Morston and Salthouse.

Much of what has been lost or damaged will in due course be dealt with. As Janice noted, they are a hardy bunch along the Norfolk coast and its amazing to see how much has already been achieved. Some locations seem strange and altered but will soon be as familiar as before. Last evening on the bank at Overy it was actually quite difficult to believe what happened. The path has a new soft topping - it's just like walking on a bed of pine needles - of material swept in off the marsh, the birds are there in numbers and the sky remains.

And then you come across strange things in the wrong place. Bits of boardwalk from Brancaster and beyond. One of the footbridges from the marsh, high and dry at the top of the bank. It's difficult to yet see how the creek and the marsh have changed but this will become clearer as time passes.

Peter Beck, long time resident of Overy and a man who probably knows as much about the place as any remarked some six months ago, that a big event - storm or flood - was well overdue and that all the groynes and banks in the world can be swept away on just one tide. Along this coast the sea has always won and that has not changed - nor likely to.