Walk: East Head, West Wittering

There is a lovely walk of 3 kms around East Head sand dunes at the mouth of Chichester Harbour. A pay car-park can be found at the entrance.

Starting from the west end of the carpark walk on the seaward side of the dunes depending on the state of the tide.

There are three main habitats of the dunes.

The young yellow dunes made of recently blown sand, the older grey dunes which grow most of the plants and give them their colour and the flat damp places in-between the dunes where the water table is close to the surface.

Grey dunes grow some strange and rare plants such as sea holly with its dead-looking greeny-grey holly-shaped leaves.

The centre of the flower is bright powder blue.

It is in the carrot family so is related to plants such as gipsy’s lace, coriander, and pignut.

Sea spurge grows here too but the very rare Portland spurge disappeared 60 years ago.

Mosses, lichens and ferns grow in the grey dunes as well as evening primrose and sea bindweed.

Notice how sand-sedge creeps along underground sending up tufts of long narrow leaves like umbrella spokes every four inches.

The marram grass which was replanted after the National Trust took over East Head in 1974 has now made enormous dense tufts with long roots to hold the dunes in place.

Walking through the slacks will show you tufts of sea rush.

At the northern tip of East Head the view shows you Kingley Vale and Bow Hill on the South Downs.

In the harbour to the left is Portsmouth spinnaker tower and the Isle of Wight and nearer to the left is the military base of Thorney Island with Hayling Island just across the water.

Keeping right-handed you will pass over some shingle spits and then on the way back pass through a very rare Sussex plant community on flat tidal saltings, which is where two species of sea lavender grow with their bright blue-mauve flowers.

Here also grows glasswort, aka samphire, and annual sea-blight.

To your left the ground quickly descends into mudflats where the South-american rice grass grows in scattered clumps.

It was brought to the UK on the bottoms of ships a 120 years ago and dominated the mudflats but is now beginning to die out.

Sea birds on these mudflats include brent geese, curlew, oystercatcher, redshank, dunlin, ring plover, and many species of gulls including the Mediterranean gull.