Amid the mudflats

If you’ve been waking up at 3 a.m. after yet another nightmare about climate change, there’s been a well-timed antidote on Radio Four this week. On The Estuary (made by the wildlife team, Chris Watson as sound recordist, Mike Dilger as naturalist and Stephen Head as the landscape historian), we heard how The Wash on the east coast of England has ebbed and flowed through the centuries. Maybe we are entering a new meteorological phase where sea levels will rise and what were once silty fields and verdant pastures will disappear under water. But what’s new? The estuary of the fenland rivers has changed radically over the last 12,000 years since the icecap melted and the North Sea became a huge tundra plain. We humans are as nothing; mere witnesses to natural changes over which we have no control.

The soundtrack of this evocative series of 15-minute shorts (broadcast mid-afternoon from Monday to Friday) had very few words, but instead created vivid aural pictures of that vast wetland wilderness, mudflats shimmering as the sea rushes in and out, thousands of birds wheeling overhead, squawking, squealing, hooting. Knots, dunlins, godwits, redshanks — what ancient, atmospheric names. In the winter months 400,000 of them take over the huge estuary, from Skegness to Hunstanton and Boston to King’s Lynn, fleeing the northern icecap. Grey plovers with their telltale jet-black bibs and chequerboard markings like a Formula One flag, red-breasted mergansers with their spiky punk hairdos and serrated bills, and the pink-footed geese from Siberia.

It’s a desolate, dangerous place for mere mortals, the tides rushing in so fast, the mudflats so unstable. In 1216 when King John was on the move around the country trying to tame his unruly baron lords, he travelled from Lynn to Wisbech by the safe landlocked route but ordered his baggage train to take the shortcut across the Wash causeway.