Blakeney Point, Norfolk: The old steamer, called Yankee, has long been abandoned on the shingle, dwindling in the elements. I take the four-mile walk to visit.
There are thrushes on the wind today. A redwing has just landed in the veil of shrubby seablite between the tidal ooze of Blakeney Pit and the shingle where I’m standing. Exhausted by its crossing from Scandinavia, this handsome bird sits in a seablite’s wind-torn tips and lets me watch. Mottle-chested, creamy-browed, it is exquisite.
I have made the four-mile, shingle-crunching pilgrimage from Cley to near the end of Blakeney Point to visit my great-great-grandfather. To visit his memory, at least. He was Martin Fountain Page, co-owner of Page and Turner, last of the River Glaven shipping companies in 700 years of documented navigation here. Beneath the doormat in the north porch of Blakeney Church lies a slab of polished stone, engraved to his eternal memory, generous benefactor of the village as he was.
But I have come to think about him in this lonely place, where sea campion and thrift are bravely still in bloom, by the wreck of one of his last ships. In the 1890s, when he suffered a devastating stroke, the company was disbanded, its ships sold. One of them, a twin-screw steamer by the name of Yankee, became a houseboat. Long since abandoned on a shingly digit stretching southwards from the end of Blakeney Point, here she rests and rusts today.
Not 50 yards from the first landfall of a winter redwing, on the spit now known as Yankee Ridge, I find her. A little less of her, perhaps, than when I came last year. Rainwater has gathered in her belly and, where her heavy plates of steel have crumbled, seablite has reached its stubby olive fingers up to cradle her. I too place my fingers on her lichen-spattered hull, touching 150 years of family in this salt-whipped place. As I do, a hare starts from beside me, scattering shingle, and calling me abruptly to the present.
