Walton-on-the-Naze

_*Parking at The Naze is pay and display all year round and the site is grassed so can get a little muddy in bad weather, however, the site does benefit from toilet facilities and there is always plenty of space to park.  As the car park is on top of the cliffs the view from here out to sea is stunning.  From the car park to the beach is a short walk down some concrete steps which makes it difficult for the less mobile, particularly coming back up after a days fun on the beach.  Wheelchair users and would benefit from visiting the beach as Walton town which has parking just the other side of a sea wall and where there are all the facilities you would expect in an English seaside town.

_*Along the beach in the Littoral zone are expanses of a slimy grey rock called London Clay.  Although these areas can be somewhat treacherous underfoot they are well worth a closer look as they contain large numbers of Barnea candida (White Piddock).  Usually all you will see are the holes that they have bored into the soft rock using their rasp-like shells but occasionally you will see the shell of a dead specimen poking out of one of these holes as the rock has been eroded away around it.  It is also possible to find intact shells lying on the beach that have been fully eroded out of their old homes.

_*When you reach the area around the first of two World War Two “pillboxes”, after around 200m of walking, take some time to have a good look around the structure and the organisms that have made it their home. The most visible organisms are the seaweeds Fucus vesiculosus (Bladder Wrack) and Fucus serratus (Saw Wrack) and the barnacle Semibalanus balanoides. If you are gentle, then by lifting some of the seaweed you might well find some Littorina littorea (Common Periwinkle), which prefers to hold on to a hard surface, like a rock, rather than cling to seaweed.  When it settles for a period of emersion it excretes mucus which then seals between the operculum (shell opening) and the rock, helping to maintain its position and to reduce the rate of water loss until the next high tide.

_*Slightly further up the beach is the second “pillbox” which is by far the more interesting of the two.  Due to the different way that this structure fell from the eroding cliffs it retains water at low tide and therefore provides a refuge for intertidal organisms.  In addition to the seaweeds, barnacles and periwinkles, there can be seen many examples of Actinia equina (Beadlet Anemone), Carcinus maenas (Green Shore Crab) and if you are patient enough to look for them, Leptochiton asellus (Chiton).

_*On your walk back to the steps up from the beach look along the strandline up towards the cliffs and the lucky ones will find fossils that have been washed out of the cliffs.  These include ancient shark teeth and the left-handed red whelk, Neptunea contraria, now extinct in our waters.  Please be very careful if you do go looking for fossils, only look along the strandline for those that have been naturally exposed as the cliffs are very unstable and dangerous due to the reasons outlined below.

One of the biggest problems for the Naze cliffs is the rate of erosion.  This erosion is not entirely the work of the sea but is also caused by the particular geology of this area.  The layers that can be seen are a top layer of soft reddish rock called Red Crag that is permeable to water, the lower layer is a soft grey rock called London Clay that is not permeable to water.  The initial destabilisation of the cliff face occurs when rainwater seeps through the Red Crag then cannot pass through the London Clay.  This leads to a heavy layer of saturated rock on top of what is quite a slippery base rock.  Under this weight and with the added help of wave action the Red Crag then slips off the London Clay base and is quickly dispersed by the sea.