TOPOGRAPHY OF BLAKENEY POINT. 
487 
leeward, numerous salt marshes have accreted, whilst towards 
its extremity — where the sea shallows off the headland from 
the accumulation of vast quantities of sand — much of the latter 
has been blown from the strand to form systems of sand dunes, 
which rest upon and mask the shingle. 
Blakeney Point is thus an aggregate of shingle beaches, 
sand dunes, and salt marshes, all the materials of which have 
been derived from and sorted out by the sea. It is no doubt 
the re-incorporated residuum of an old land area, but whether 
this was formerly a seaward extension of the existing coast, or 
whether under very different conditions the materials were 
eroded from inland by the River Glaven of those days, are 
questions outside the province of the present article. In many 
similar formations of this kind, existing sources of supply from 
the present waste of cliffs seem inadequate to account for such 
vast accumulations of shingle — as, for instance, in the case of 
the Chesil Bank, in Dorset — and it is quite possible the same 
may be true of Blakeney Point. 
Of this structure the terminal three and a-half miles form 
the National Trust Reserve, i.e., the whole of that represented 
in Fig. 1, together with an additional half-mile to the East; 
the Trust also possess the strip of saltings abutting on the 
reclaimed marshes between Blakeney and Cley. All in all, 
the Reserve is a self-contained area of outstanding interest 
— physically, botanically, and as a haunt of birds. 
The great peculiarity of the Blakeney spit is the high degree 
of complexity it has attained from repeated branching, a 
feature wherein it occupies a class by itself among similar 
formations in the British Isles. 
If the spit be followed from its point of departure at 
Weybourne to its extremity beyond Blakeney, it will be found 
to consist of a straight, unbranched shingle beach for the first 
five miles (i.e., up to the right-hand edge of the map, Fig. 1) — 
a toilsome causeway, about 400 feet in width, sloping from the 
crest at a very gentle angle to the marshes on its lee flank, 
more steeply on the sea face. The crest, though it stands 
fully six feet above the level of spring tide high-water mark, is 
