What the house writes down.

The low-water hour

Twice a day the tidal field empties and the bay grows a second beach — firm, rippled, and printed with whatever walked it first. The hour either side of low water is the walking hour: out by the jetty, back by the point, boots optional and usually regretted.

The kitchen posts the day's low waters at breakfast. Trust the board, not your phone — the lane sits in a signal shadow, which we have come to consider a feature.

Seals haul out on the far bar most weeks. Take the binoculars from the hall, not the dune path — they were there first.

What the grass holds

The dunes are not scenery; they are infrastructure. Every stem of marram is a tent peg holding the field's roof down, which is why the path winds the way it does and why we ask you to keep to it even when the straight line looks kinder.

The shore levy on every stay goes here: path boards, the winter replanting, and the jetty's annual argument with the storms. You will have paid for a few stems — in spring you can come back and meet them.

The garden is ahead of us

The kitchen garden has out-produced the kitchen for three weeks running. Courgettes arrive at the table in every disguise the cookbooks allow and one or two they don't. The long table has voted to keep planting anyway.

If you are staying this month: the plums along the south wall come ripe in the second week, and the kitchen pays for windfalls in cake. Children negotiate hard rates.