Holkham National Nature Reserve, Norfolk, England
Cool, crystalline sand slips under my bare feet as I weave between tufts of marram grass, swaying in the breeze. Reaching the top of the dune, I turn to gaze across a vast golden beach and the darker tidal flats beyond, the North Sea a shimmering sliver on the horizon.
‘Welcome to the best view in Holkham,’ says my guide, Jake Fiennes, director at Holkham National Nature Reserve (NNR), home to one of the UK’s most important coastal dune systems.
Stretching from Great Yarmouth in the west round to The Wash in the east, Norfolk’s dunes provide sanctuary for countless plants and wildlife species and help defend swathes of the county’s 145km coastline from erosion by wind, waves and tidal surges. Designated in 1967, the 10,000-acre Holkham NNR is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, with woodlands, wetlands, an orchid valley and dunes dating back hundreds of years, along with some of Europe’s most significant salt-marsh habitat – wetland that’s flooded and drained by the tides.
‘The reserve is a heavily protected natural site,’ says Jake, as we meander along Holkham Beach at low tide. ‘It’s also visited by a million people each year.’
With the town of Wells-next-the-Sea and the historic Palladian-style hall and gardens of the Holkham Estate nearby, this beautifully wild stretch of the Norfolk coast isn’t just a haven for nesting and migrating birds, but a magnet for holidaymakers and nature lovers, too.
‘People come in summer for a classic British seaside experience, to enjoy the beach and the dunes, which are awash with colourful wild flowers, including lady’s bedstraw and pyramidal orchids,’ says Jake, as we pass families picnicking on the sand. ‘In spring and early summer, the salt marsh is alive with lapwings, spoonbills, avocets and wigeons, and in late summer, 60,000 pink-footed geese from Iceland start to fly in. By midwinter, we have 200,000 birds here – and thousands of birders following them.’
Managing these varied ecosystems, wildlife and human footfall is a full-time challenge, which Jake and the Holkham Estate team share with Natural England and the Crown Estate, in close consultation with conservation organisations including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the National Trust and the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. Boardwalks are in place to view the birdlife swooping above the carpet of sea lavender and succulent green samphire on the salt marshes, and there are hides and binoculars for guests to respectfully observe the wildlife. The neighbouring Pinewoods holiday park offers an eco-friendly stay, plus a lagoon and nature trail, rich with butterflies, bees and bats.
As many seabird and shorebird populations are in decline, areas are also managed to protect nesting ringed plovers, oystercatchers and little terns, along with rare natterjack toads.
With nearly 5km of pristine pine forest running behind the beach, I assume the woodlands are native and as old as the dunes themselves, but as we crunch through the pine cones, Jake reveals that they were planted over the course of 300 years by various Earls of Leicester, owners of the Holkham Estate.
‘Millions of trees were planted on the dunes in an effort to control sand drift and protect the land from the sea, and they’ve become a unique landscape feature here at Holkham,’ says Jake, who’s also the author of Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside. ‘But with the loss of dune habitat nationally, due to erosion, invasive species, recreation and rising sea levels, we now manage the forest to stop it spreading. Sand dunes are dynamic and naturally evolve with the tides and wind: trees stem this movement and “fossilise” them. Holding the forest’s line ensures that our dune-adapted plants and animals have the habitat they need to thrive, and our human visitors can continue to enjoy the dunes for generations to come.’
Pinewoods offers caravan holiday homes and luxury lodges near Holkham NNR. Find out more at pinewoods.co.uk and holkham.co.uk. For information about Norfolk, go to visitnorfolk.co.uk
Red Centre, Northern Territory, Australia
For many people, sand dunes stir memories of sunny days at the beach, but phenomenal dunes rise and fall across inland regions, too, created by dust and sand swept by winds around the world. Much of Australia’s vast central deserts are covered in linear dunes, with the first forming around 900,000 years ago in the Lake Amadeus region and some stretching for more than 100km.
From the air, the sanguine sands surrounding the Red Centre’s sacred Aboriginal monolith, Uluru, appear almost flat, but explore Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park on foot and you’ll discover ochre and orange dunes teeming with life, offering viewpoints to take in some of the continent’s most spectacular landscapes.
Crossing the dunes to watch the sun awaken the slumbering sandstone domes of Kata Tjuta, I see a spaghetti-tangle of tracks dappling the deep-red, oxidised silicate sands: tiny footprints of spiky thorny devils, the lightest traces of slithering snakes and the toe-to-tail calling card of a 2-metre prehistoric perentie lizard. I’m in the desert, but lush vegetation abounds, the rippled sands at my feet tattooed with tough rings of fireproof spinifex grass, while surreally beautiful desert oaks sway softly above.
Like many dunescapes around the world, those surrounding Uluru have been inspiring artists for thousands of years, from the cave, hand and dot paintings of the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land, the Anangu, to contemporary creators finding new ways to tell stories in this ancient realm.
Captivated by the region during a camping trip to Uluru in 1992, British light artist Bruce Munro developed an ambitious idea for a light installation that would complement the natural beauty and serenity of the desert and dunes, finally realising his creative vision when the Field of Light installation opened here in 2016. Given the Pitjantjatjara name Tili Wiru Tjuta Nyakutjaku or ‘looking at lots of beautiful lights’, Field of Light sees a vast area of desert, 15km from Uluru, covered with 50,000 solar-powered handblown stems and bulbs. Initially commissioned as a temporary exhibit, it’s become one of the region’s most popular attractions, visited on sunrise and sunset tours from nearby Ayers Rock Resort.
Arriving at the installation before sunrise, I walk silently down a dune that leads to the field, lights gently phasing from red to violet, blue and white, a whisper of wind and the crunch of my boots on the sand the only sounds. As the sun emerges on the horizon, the desert oaks glow gold and the bulbs begin to fade: one fairy tale ends and another day in Wonderland begins.
‘Every time I’m at Uluru, I feel completely happy and connected to the world,’ Bruce tells me on a call from his family home in Wiltshire. ‘There is a clarity about the place that gets you in your guts. I thought the desert would have the opposite effect on me, but it’s incredibly alive. Under the ground, across the dunes and in the air, it’s almost pulsating. Field of Light is the expression of how the landscape – the oldest landscape on Earth – made me feel, and a small thank-you for what it has inspired in me.’
Travelbag offers nine nights in the Northern Territory, including return flights, hotels, four-day Kings Canyon, Uluru and Kata Tjuta tour, Kakadu and Litchfield national park tours and internal flights. See travelbag.co.uk for details. Read more about the Red Centre and Northern Territory at northernterritory.com, and follow the work of Bruce Munro at brucemunro.co.uk
Oregon Coast, Pacific Northwest, US
‘The easiest way up is by zig-zagging across, but take your time: we have a few hours before sunset,’ says Kieron Wilde, founder and expedition leader at First Nature, which offers sustainable adventure tours of North America’s Pacific Northwest.
We’re standing on Oregon’s Pacific shore at the base of the Great Dune, which looms more than 65 metres above the beach at Cape Kiwanda State Natural Area. At the top, conquerors of the steep slope busy themselves like ants, while others are already enjoying an adrenaline-fuelled descent, bounding down the golden dune, blazing sand trails on their rocketing return to Earth.
A rugged headland to the north of beach town Pacific City, Cape Kiwanda is one of many points on this stretch of coastline where powerful forces of nature meet. Over thousands of years, crashing waves and swirling winds have devoured swathes of the Cape’s orange and rust-red sandstone and forced the headland’s gnarled sitka spruce trees to bow in awe, while a basalt sea stack, Haystack Rock, rises from the ocean like a shark fin offshore.
‘Let’s go! A glass of Oregon’s finest will be waiting on our return,’ says Kieron as he sets off. It’s all the motivation we need for our climb: the state produces some of the best wines in the US, in the vineyards of the Willamette Valley to the east.
Oregon’s exhilarating natural landscapes are made for adventure, with climbing and skiing on peaks like Mount Hood and Mount Jefferson, hiking trails around the US’s deepest lake in Crater Lake National Park, biking or kayaking through Columbia River Gorge, and boat trips to see grey whales on their epic migration along the coast.
South of Pacific City, Florence is the gateway to the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, one of the world’s largest expanses of coastal dunes, which lies within the Siuslaw National Forest and stretches for 64km, providing a sanctuary for more than 400 species.
‘The Oregon Dunes region includes coastal forests, wetlands and estuaries that support a wide range of wildlife, including shorebirds, elk and black-tailed deer,’ says Kieron. With some of the tallest dunes in North America, soaring to 150 metres, it’s also a playground for encounters of the sandy kind.
‘The dune buggy riding here is some of the best in the US, and there are plenty of other great recreational opportunities including hiking, biking, horse riding, off-roading and sandboarding,’ says Kieron.
Like Holkham, the Oregon Dunes were historically tamed by planting non-native species to prevent sand from drifting and disrupting the movement of trading goods on the roads along the Pacific Coast. European and American beachgrass were sown in the early 1900s and soon formed dense mats covering the dune system, pushing out native plants like pink sand verbena and grey beach peavine, and creatures that need open sand to survive, such as the western snowy plover, while providing extra cover for predators like coyotes to hunt them.
Now, the Oregon Dunes Restoration Collaborative is on a mission to restore the windblown sand, preserve healthy dune habitat and eliminate invasive species, harnessing the power of local communities, the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, conservationists and environmental groups.
After watching the sun dropping like a burning ball into the ocean from high on the dune at Cape Kiwanda, Kieron and I descend in the fading light to join a bonfire on the beach at Headlands Coastal Lodge. Above us, a million stars stud the sky, cloaking the dune’s inky silhouette, and the ocean breeze ripples across the sand, as it has for millennia.
Purely America offers a 10-night Wild Oregon self-drive tour, including stays in Portland, the Willamette Valley, Pacific City, Astoria and Hood River, return flights and car hire. Visit purelytravel.co.uk/Oregon for details. First Nature runs sustainable guided adventure tours of the Pacific Northwest. Find out more at firstnaturetours.com. To learn all about Oregon, visit traveloregon.com, and to follow the work of the Oregon Dunes Restoration Collaborative, go to saveoregondunes.org