To set foot on Horsey Island, one must secure two permissions: one from the farmer and the other from the tide, which grants a four-hour window every 12 hours to cross the causeway. The crossing itself takes 20 minutes, wading through deeper sections where spindly marker posts guide the way. The mud on either side rises a foot higher than the track, riddled with tiny creeks where seawater rushes along invisible gradients. The entire expanse fizzes and trickles as air and water escape from the mud and heaps of bladderwrack.
A literary connection deepens the experience
The dreamlike quality is heightened by a sense of déjà vu. Horsey Island is the setting for Secret Water, part of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, which the author loved as a child and revisited frequently when her son read little else. In the story, two adventurous children are trapped by rising water on the River Wade and rescued by a marsh-wise local boy nicknamed the Mastodon, due to the enormous round tracks left by his “splatchers” – snowshoes for traversing mud.
Innovative farming on a unique island
Horsey Island is home to a family of four humans, five dogs, a few hundred sheep, some visiting cattle, and thousands of birds. Nests are everywhere: swallows in the farmhouse sunroom; skylarks, lapwings, and oystercatchers in the pastures; avocet, redshank, and black-headed gulls on tiny islets in the scrapes and ponds. Scanning a human-made shingle beach on the island’s eastern edge, newly hatched little terns are spotted, resembling downy pompoms escaped from a craft basket.
Joe and Vicky Backhouse steward these salty acres with care. Wildflowers flourish where sheep are excluded. An innovative project uses 50,000 cubic metres of mud dredged from Felixstowe port to raise a dwindling area of marsh that suffered overgrazing – not by sheep, but by thousands of geese that arrive every winter. “We use less than 1% of dredged mud for any beneficial purpose. In Spain they use 90%,” Joe says. As sea levels rise, this little swatch of England is rising too.
