Yelping redshank rose at intervals from creeks and gutters as I slid my way across the saltings. The ‘kour-lee’ of a solitary curlew and the skittering flute of a whimbrel whispered through the darkness.
A pallid quarter-moon had long ago finished its nightshift and the quicksilver tides crept inexorably into the estuary. Only the ancient walls of a church tower were illuminated, casting long shadows across the marsh. They seemed to support the view of Noel M Sedgwick (Tower-Bird), a former editor of this magazine, who wrote of wildfowling that “beauty is strangely found where only desolation seems to dwell”. Beauty and desolation were evident to me in the jutting chestnut posts of abandoned oyster beds, the faintest blush in the eastern sky and tiny white-crested wavelets on the water.
