What Lies Beneath When the tide goes out around Jersey, it keeps on going to reveal some astonishing sights, from diverse wildlife to Napoleonic forts. Jeremy Seal explores this wilderness before it's hidden once again by the encroaching sea. Sunday Telegraph, 27/4/2006

Receded isn’t the word; the English Channel has legged it. Low tide on Jersey’s southeast corner has exposed miles of boulder fields, shingle banks, slicks of glistening kelp, sea-streaming waterfalls and beached Napoleonic sea forts dripping dry in the spring sunshine. The plug-pulled scapes I’m looking at are wild, lunar and alluring, the more so for their impermanence. There’s more than bucket-strewn strands and quaint fishing ports to this holiday island, as marine wildlife enthusiasts, sea kayakers and connoisseurs of wetland wildernesses are beginning to appreciate.
Jersey is waking up to the fact that its world-class tidal range – up to 40 vertical feet at ‘springs’, 33 feet on the April weekend of my visit – is no mere hazardous curiosity. It is nothing less than a natural wonder, exposing as it does an area more than two and a half times the island’s high-tide extent. These 80 square miles of extensive shallows, both onshore and around the island’s offshore reefs at Les Ecrehous and Les Minquiers, were recently recognized as special sites under the RAMSAR Wetlands Convention. I’m getting to know them with Jerseyman Andrew Syvret on one of his ‘moon walks’ off La Rocque Harbour and Green Island east of St Helier. Syvret’s inspirational low-tide rambles, which he has been leading for a decade now, have done much to bring the diverse wildlife and social history of Jersey’s inter-tidal zone to prominence; so much so that local operators are following his lead to explore tidal tourism’s wider possibilities. Expeditions in sea kayaks, perfectly suited to exploring Jersey’s shifting margins, are newly available from professional kayaker Derek Hairon. And it shouldn’t be long before visitors can bunk ‘offshore’ on guided adventure stays at the area’s Napoleonic sea forts, Seymour and Ic-Hou, if refurbishment plans go ahead. Meantime, there’s always the sumptous Longueville Manor, all of 30 feet above the high-water mark, which proves just the place to recover from the weathering rigours of sand, salt and sun, and to sate a sea-sharpened appetite.
‘It may sound cheesy,’ says Syvret, as we walk out across the shingle, ‘but I really did learn my tide tables before my times tables.’ Sensibly enough, it seems, for we soon pass a platform refuge for the unwary; the tides here can rise vertically by as much as a metre every twenty minutes.
Syvret points out edible seaweeds including the curry-flavoured pepper dulse and some of the 160 shell types found in these richly oxygenated waters. There are tiny cowries, moonshells and mermaids’ nipples as well as ormers, the rare abalone which fetch £6 a time at St Helier’s market. Distant figures with wicker baskets, mostly day visitors from Normandy, are raking the sands for the prized molluscs called praires (warty venus), and a tractor is moving among the island’s oyster beds. For a part-time place it almost seems busy but was once worked far more intensively. Syvret points out a rock neatly chiseled in antique font with the letter ‘P’ which marks the 18th-century boundary of the Payne family’s territory for collecting vraic (seaweed), an essential field fertilizer until recent times.
Our walk takes us into a gully far beyond Seymour Fort where we can no longer see Jersey; disconcerting, especially since the only dry land in sight – the cathedral spire at Coutances – requires a passport to visit. Syvret’s al fresco aquarium tour is nearing its end, for we must beat the rising tide back to shore. There’s no such need the next morning. The ‘sit-on’ sea kayak I’m riding can do deep, shallow or even aground with equal ease, and one becomes the other very fast indeed on Les Ecrehous six miles northeast of Jersey.
Derek Hairon, veteran of many visits to the reef, delivers us there by a high-speed inflatable specially fitted with kayak racks on a sunlit, windless morning. We arrive among an archipelago of rock heads and islets. The summits of the largest half-dozen, arranged around a central lagoon strewn with a handful of yachts and fisherman’s boats, are topped with stone huts. We take to the kayaks and allow the ebb-tide current to sweep us past the largest islet, La Maitre Ile, with its remnants of a pasture, ruined priory and fetid colony of shags. Barely fifty yards separate it from the ‘main’ settlement, La Marmotiere, where granite-walled huts are perched beneath corrugated-iron roofs in a weather-minded cluster. There’s a wooden bench alongside a pole where the flag of Jersey, one of several across the reef, flies as a reminder of Les Ecrehous’ contested status. French nationalists claimed it as recently as 1994 and the occupying Germans strafed the place during the war; the bullet-holes can still be seen in a Marmotiere chimney pot.
The huts, once home to fishermen and smugglers, now house seasonal visitors from Jersey, mostly people with a long association with the reef; from our kayaks we watch them collect winkles in saucepans along their rapidly extending foreshores. ‘Connemara,’ a group member murmurs; ‘Mousehole’, says another; but there are also stretches of rock-strewn ivory sand which are positively Seychellois, and gin-clear shallows where seals dive among the kelp which remind me of the Galapagos. As an ensemble in miniature, it’s startling.
We put ashore on La Marmotiere’s long sandbar and step inside a tiny square enclosed on all sides by a terrace of huts, their walls engraved with 19th century dates. Derek Hairon shows us round the Customs hut; the visitor’s book recounts the summer day in 1994 when a group of French nationalists landed to lay claim to the reef. It is low water when we step outside. The boats are now beached in the drained lagoon and stone steps lead up to the huts, perched bizarrely high above a vast expanse of drying ground. Jerseyman Nick Jouault is sitting in the sun outside his rented billet; a simple hut furnished with a church pew, a table and sleeping platform. Jouault is a regular visitor to the reef where he conducts research on the local seals for Jersey’s heritage association, the Societe Jersiase. But the reef’s self-appointed guardian also comes for the birdlife, the constantly shifting scenery and for the solitude.
We return to the kayaks and paddle for the outer rocks where the submerging kelp is streaming out on a strengthening current. The inflatable is waiting to take us off from a white-sand spit – add the Maldives to that mix - where we beach our kayaks. All around, gannets from the colony on Alderney are plummeting for mackerel in the alarmingly shallow waters. Our spit has disappeared by the time the kayaks are loaded for Jersey. As we leave we catch a last glance of Les Ecrehous, and people returning by the steps to their huts before the rising tide.
ENDS
Jeremy Seal was a guest of Longueville Manor (01534 725501; www.longuevillemanor.com) and Flyjersey. Call Flyjersey (0845 6033125; www.flyjersey.com, quoting C670) for their 2-night B&B packages at the Longueville, including car hire and return flights from Gatwick at £379 per person.
For dates of ‘moon walks’, costing £10 per person, contact Andrew Syvret (www.jerseybass.com; 01534 485201).
For prices and details of Jersey Kayak Adventures’ tours to Les Ecrehous and elsewhere, call 07797 853033 or visit www.jerseykayakadventures.co.uk.
Jersey Tourism (01534 500777; www.jersey.com).
LOW TIDE BRITAIN
The treacherous sands of Morecambe Bay, where a group of Chinese cocklers were tragically drowned in 2004, can be safely crossed in the company of royally appointed guide Cedric Robinson who leads a programme of 3-hour walks from May to September, starting at Arnside. For details, call Grange-over-Sands Tourism on 01539 534026.
The Goodwin Sands off Ramsgate are a vast expanse of golden sand at low-tide, with basking seals and a rich shipwreck history. Trips can be arranged through local licensed boatmen Tony Thatcher in Ramsgate (01843 590074) or Dover White Cliffs Boat Tours (01303 271388).
Every summer, thousands of Isle of Wight residents gather on the lowest tide (August 11th this year) for the Bembridge ‘fort walk’ out to the Napoleonic fort which usually forms part of the local seascape. It’s a spectacular sight, traditionally followed by a mass beach barbeque. www.isleofwight.com/bembridge.html
Walk the causeway at low water, or take a ferry when the tide comes in, to the medieval castle and church at St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall. The home of the St Aubyn family is part Benedictine priory, part embattled castle. 01736 710507; www.stmichaelsmount.co.uk
Angel of the North sculptor Antony Gormley has officially unveiled a new installation on Crosby Beach. Another Place consists of 100 cast-iron, life-size figures spread out along three kilometres of the foreshore, stretching almost one kilometre out to sea. Each visitor will experience the work in a different way depending on the state of the tide, the weather conditions and the time of day they are visiting. At particularly high tides all the figures will be submerged. www.merseywaterfront.com
The Hilbre Islands in the Wirral, part of the Dee Estuary SSSI, can be reached on foot at low-tide from West Kirby. The islands are noted for seals and birdlife, and are cut off from the mainland for about a third of the time. No facilities. www.wirral.gov.uk/er/hilbre.htm
Rangers of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park run a series of summer rockpool rambles and seashore safaris for children on the county’s famed beaches including Manorbier and Newport. For more information, visit www.eventsinpembrokeshire.com or call 08705 103103.
Jersey is waking up to the fact that its world-class tidal range – up to 40 vertical feet at ‘springs’, 33 feet on the April weekend of my visit – is no mere hazardous curiosity. It is nothing less than a natural wonder, exposing as it does an area more than two and a half times the island’s high-tide extent. These 80 square miles of extensive shallows, both onshore and around the island’s offshore reefs at Les Ecrehous and Les Minquiers, were recently recognized as special sites under the RAMSAR Wetlands Convention. I’m getting to know them with Jerseyman Andrew Syvret on one of his ‘moon walks’ off La Rocque Harbour and Green Island east of St Helier. Syvret’s inspirational low-tide rambles, which he has been leading for a decade now, have done much to bring the diverse wildlife and social history of Jersey’s inter-tidal zone to prominence; so much so that local operators are following his lead to explore tidal tourism’s wider possibilities. Expeditions in sea kayaks, perfectly suited to exploring Jersey’s shifting margins, are newly available from professional kayaker Derek Hairon. And it shouldn’t be long before visitors can bunk ‘offshore’ on guided adventure stays at the area’s Napoleonic sea forts, Seymour and Ic-Hou, if refurbishment plans go ahead. Meantime, there’s always the sumptous Longueville Manor, all of 30 feet above the high-water mark, which proves just the place to recover from the weathering rigours of sand, salt and sun, and to sate a sea-sharpened appetite.
‘It may sound cheesy,’ says Syvret, as we walk out across the shingle, ‘but I really did learn my tide tables before my times tables.’ Sensibly enough, it seems, for we soon pass a platform refuge for the unwary; the tides here can rise vertically by as much as a metre every twenty minutes.
Syvret points out edible seaweeds including the curry-flavoured pepper dulse and some of the 160 shell types found in these richly oxygenated waters. There are tiny cowries, moonshells and mermaids’ nipples as well as ormers, the rare abalone which fetch £6 a time at St Helier’s market. Distant figures with wicker baskets, mostly day visitors from Normandy, are raking the sands for the prized molluscs called praires (warty venus), and a tractor is moving among the island’s oyster beds. For a part-time place it almost seems busy but was once worked far more intensively. Syvret points out a rock neatly chiseled in antique font with the letter ‘P’ which marks the 18th-century boundary of the Payne family’s territory for collecting vraic (seaweed), an essential field fertilizer until recent times.
Our walk takes us into a gully far beyond Seymour Fort where we can no longer see Jersey; disconcerting, especially since the only dry land in sight – the cathedral spire at Coutances – requires a passport to visit. Syvret’s al fresco aquarium tour is nearing its end, for we must beat the rising tide back to shore. There’s no such need the next morning. The ‘sit-on’ sea kayak I’m riding can do deep, shallow or even aground with equal ease, and one becomes the other very fast indeed on Les Ecrehous six miles northeast of Jersey.
Derek Hairon, veteran of many visits to the reef, delivers us there by a high-speed inflatable specially fitted with kayak racks on a sunlit, windless morning. We arrive among an archipelago of rock heads and islets. The summits of the largest half-dozen, arranged around a central lagoon strewn with a handful of yachts and fisherman’s boats, are topped with stone huts. We take to the kayaks and allow the ebb-tide current to sweep us past the largest islet, La Maitre Ile, with its remnants of a pasture, ruined priory and fetid colony of shags. Barely fifty yards separate it from the ‘main’ settlement, La Marmotiere, where granite-walled huts are perched beneath corrugated-iron roofs in a weather-minded cluster. There’s a wooden bench alongside a pole where the flag of Jersey, one of several across the reef, flies as a reminder of Les Ecrehous’ contested status. French nationalists claimed it as recently as 1994 and the occupying Germans strafed the place during the war; the bullet-holes can still be seen in a Marmotiere chimney pot.
The huts, once home to fishermen and smugglers, now house seasonal visitors from Jersey, mostly people with a long association with the reef; from our kayaks we watch them collect winkles in saucepans along their rapidly extending foreshores. ‘Connemara,’ a group member murmurs; ‘Mousehole’, says another; but there are also stretches of rock-strewn ivory sand which are positively Seychellois, and gin-clear shallows where seals dive among the kelp which remind me of the Galapagos. As an ensemble in miniature, it’s startling.
We put ashore on La Marmotiere’s long sandbar and step inside a tiny square enclosed on all sides by a terrace of huts, their walls engraved with 19th century dates. Derek Hairon shows us round the Customs hut; the visitor’s book recounts the summer day in 1994 when a group of French nationalists landed to lay claim to the reef. It is low water when we step outside. The boats are now beached in the drained lagoon and stone steps lead up to the huts, perched bizarrely high above a vast expanse of drying ground. Jerseyman Nick Jouault is sitting in the sun outside his rented billet; a simple hut furnished with a church pew, a table and sleeping platform. Jouault is a regular visitor to the reef where he conducts research on the local seals for Jersey’s heritage association, the Societe Jersiase. But the reef’s self-appointed guardian also comes for the birdlife, the constantly shifting scenery and for the solitude.
We return to the kayaks and paddle for the outer rocks where the submerging kelp is streaming out on a strengthening current. The inflatable is waiting to take us off from a white-sand spit – add the Maldives to that mix - where we beach our kayaks. All around, gannets from the colony on Alderney are plummeting for mackerel in the alarmingly shallow waters. Our spit has disappeared by the time the kayaks are loaded for Jersey. As we leave we catch a last glance of Les Ecrehous, and people returning by the steps to their huts before the rising tide.
ENDS
Jeremy Seal was a guest of Longueville Manor (01534 725501; www.longuevillemanor.com) and Flyjersey. Call Flyjersey (0845 6033125; www.flyjersey.com, quoting C670) for their 2-night B&B packages at the Longueville, including car hire and return flights from Gatwick at £379 per person.
For dates of ‘moon walks’, costing £10 per person, contact Andrew Syvret (www.jerseybass.com; 01534 485201).
For prices and details of Jersey Kayak Adventures’ tours to Les Ecrehous and elsewhere, call 07797 853033 or visit www.jerseykayakadventures.co.uk.
Jersey Tourism (01534 500777; www.jersey.com).
LOW TIDE BRITAIN
The treacherous sands of Morecambe Bay, where a group of Chinese cocklers were tragically drowned in 2004, can be safely crossed in the company of royally appointed guide Cedric Robinson who leads a programme of 3-hour walks from May to September, starting at Arnside. For details, call Grange-over-Sands Tourism on 01539 534026.
The Goodwin Sands off Ramsgate are a vast expanse of golden sand at low-tide, with basking seals and a rich shipwreck history. Trips can be arranged through local licensed boatmen Tony Thatcher in Ramsgate (01843 590074) or Dover White Cliffs Boat Tours (01303 271388).
Every summer, thousands of Isle of Wight residents gather on the lowest tide (August 11th this year) for the Bembridge ‘fort walk’ out to the Napoleonic fort which usually forms part of the local seascape. It’s a spectacular sight, traditionally followed by a mass beach barbeque. www.isleofwight.com/bembridge.html
Walk the causeway at low water, or take a ferry when the tide comes in, to the medieval castle and church at St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall. The home of the St Aubyn family is part Benedictine priory, part embattled castle. 01736 710507; www.stmichaelsmount.co.uk
Angel of the North sculptor Antony Gormley has officially unveiled a new installation on Crosby Beach. Another Place consists of 100 cast-iron, life-size figures spread out along three kilometres of the foreshore, stretching almost one kilometre out to sea. Each visitor will experience the work in a different way depending on the state of the tide, the weather conditions and the time of day they are visiting. At particularly high tides all the figures will be submerged. www.merseywaterfront.com
The Hilbre Islands in the Wirral, part of the Dee Estuary SSSI, can be reached on foot at low-tide from West Kirby. The islands are noted for seals and birdlife, and are cut off from the mainland for about a third of the time. No facilities. www.wirral.gov.uk/er/hilbre.htm
Rangers of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park run a series of summer rockpool rambles and seashore safaris for children on the county’s famed beaches including Manorbier and Newport. For more information, visit www.eventsinpembrokeshire.com or call 08705 103103.