Our walks are selling out but we’ve added a special trip for a dozen festival goers to explore the salt marshes round East Hills by boat for an hour first thing on Sunday morning. This area is inaccessible except at very low tide and even then not safely without specialist local knowledge. Nick Groom, our expert skipper knows the currents in the channel and the right tide times to make the journey. He also has his own regular route through the mazy creeks.

There’s something captivating and almost alien about a landscape of island lumps formed from mud by twisting tides, and dotted with salt-loving plants like shrubby sea blight and samphire, which will be a bright autumnal red by the first weekend of October.

Though wild birds have suffered their own catastrophic pandemic in the past few years we hope their populations are starting to recover. Geese should be arriving to spend the winter here from summers spent in Greenland, Iceland and Siberia, and many other birds have been seen along this coast in past Octobers, including shearwaters, divers, skuas, terns, grebes, gannets, sanderling, eider, scoters and more.

Inspiration for writers, photographers and artists as well as birders and naturalists. Make sure you dress for the weather and get to the quay ahead of time. (Departure will be at 8.30 am Sunday 6th October from the Wells Ferry pontoon – not 8.45 as initially advertised…)