Brancaster on the North Norfolk coast was this week’s target location for sunrise, and meant an 04:40 get up.
Due to high tides, the club trip for Sunday was Thornham but a member had suggested Brancaster as well on the Saturday. This gave the landscape group options and what one member described as an option for a double banger for those that wanted to do Saturday and Sunday sunrises.
As I had shot Thornham recently at high tide (albeit sunset), and had only previously shot Brancaster Staithe at sunset, I chose Brancaster and decided to cancel my Sunday Thornham booking. As it turned out, I’d be getting the double banger anyway.
About Brancaster Staithe
Brancaster Staithe is in the civil parish of Brancaster, together with Burnham Deepdale and Brancaster itself. The three villages form a more or less continuous settlement along the A149 at the edge of the Brancaster Manor marshland and the Scolt Head Island National Nature Reserve.
Brancaster Staithe merges into Burnham Deepdale. Although separate villages, the two act as one, sharing facilities. Brancaster Staithe has the main harbour access, sailing club, sailing school, The White Horse pub & hotel and The Jolly Sailors pub.
The origin of the name Brancaster Staithe is unclear, however, several theories have been put forward. The name Brancaster is thought to be a combination of the Latin word “castra“, meaning a walled town or Roman station, and “brom”, an Old English word meaning a hill where broom grows, in this case probably referring to the furze located on Barrow Common.
Brancaster Staithe has a harbour, sailing club, two pubs, sailing school, National Trust activity centre and many other facilities.
Brancaster Staithe is a location which, like Blakeney, every year people park their cars on parking areas and get caught out by their car being stranded by a high tide. Often these get the owner a picture of their stranded car in the local press.
The Shoot
We parked near the sailing club to ensure no high tide water would get near our vehicles.
The harbour and usual car park areas where already under water so we walked up to the patch of land where the sailing boats are moored and down to the end to do a recce. We watched the morning light start to emerge and began thinking about compositions.
My first image turned out to be my favourite and the featured image for this blog post. It’s a long exposure which, with the blurred movement of the boat, smoothed out water and colour tones provides a painterly look.
The incoming high tide was moving in very quickly so we had to keep checking around our feet, and retreating back.
I took the image below of the boat yard and really like the warm and cool colour tones offsetting each other.
A close-up crop of the two boats also delivers similar but with more detail to take in.
With sea water swilling around the bottom of my wellies, I quickly thoughts about a different composition and quite like the different view captured below.
Although others took some shots on the other side of where the boats were moored, I didn’t think there was any useful light or colours there, so I stuck to this side and took one final shots trying to use these boats as foreground interest.
At this point, the water was in so far that we risked not being able to get back to the sailing club area where our cars were parked.
One of the guys suggested we wrap it up there and pop over to Thornham, which is less than five miles West of this location.
Thornham
We arrived at Thornham to find the high tide was so high that the part of the road where we usually park was flooded, and someone had obviously left their car here earlier without thinking of checking the tide timetable.
Using the lay-bys at the top of the road, or parking at the pub car park were safer alternatives. Apparently Thornham Deli is a useful parking location but you will have to pay.
I parked up and briskly walked to the the side of the coal house because the sun location meant this would be the best spot.
One of the guys pointed out an Egret behind us on the marsh so I grabbed a shot.
I switched to my longer lens to potentially grab some more bird shots but typically nothing else was an offer at that moment.
I turned round to face the coal shed direction and thought I’d shoot something different by capturing the scene below:
As I walked back towards the coal shed, and while I had the longer lens on, I took this close up of the boat.
We all then congregated at the end of the path and looked back at the coal shed. I took,this speculative shot for one last shed image.
One of the guys shouted out that there was a buzzard flying over head so I quickly grabbed a shot.
As the guys continued to take shots of the coal shed, I had that end of shoot feeling where I had enough. I took one last show of this gull milling around.
And that was a wrap!
We wandered up towards our cars and agreed it was a good idea to leave Brancaster and come to Thornham.
For some of us, it would feel better we had done it today as we didn’t need to visit tomorrow and have another early get up. For others, a double banger (two sunrises back-to-back) would be done in one weekend.
I drove back home, stopping off for my regular breakfast courtesy of Ronald.
Overall, an enjoyable trip.
Onwards and upwards…