NATURE

It is a building set in clay-coloured mud, patched with bright green rafts of Spartina; on a tide-polished substrate where, after this ebb, silk-smooth pools glittered like so many odd-shaped mirrors reflecting the clear blue sky.

Neat rows of roosting starlings draped the roof tiles, each bird silhouetted darkly against the light of a westering sun.

In the background, the hall, a 17th century house, complete with classical Yorkshire doorway and rows of stone-mullioned windows, home to one proud Royalist before he was killed by Cromwellians during the bloody Civil War.

On the hall roof, 12 chimneys perch like squat, oblong pigeons.

Down the western side a long mark, stark legacy of an earthquake which shook the area violently a century and a half ago!

A mile northward, a grey church perches on its own bright green drumlin; a site centuries old.

This churchyard held a Bronze Age skeleton in slab-sided grave, Viking warrior (complete with rusted sword among his ancient bones) and medieval farmer, remembered by a neat headstone.

Victorian sea captains and ships' pilots are buried here.

On the shore, remote from all this, unknowing and uncaring of so much human history all about, waders and gulls had arrived with the ebb and now picked about the glistening shore - just as their species have done for so many centuries.

The gulls far outnumbered other bird species.

Most were Herring gulls - immaculate in snow white and silver grey, some bearing the grey of winter feather early on neck and crown.

A few brown juveniles were present - one big enough to fly but still begging, grovelling before a bored parent, the young bird hunch-backed, trying to tap the red spot of the adult's beak - an age-old signal - "Feed me!" A few common gulls were present, less fierce-looking; gentle-eyed, with smaller bills of waxy yellow.

Lesser black-backed gulls were few and far between.

Are they returning to old habits, the majority travelling south to overwinter off the Iberian Peninsula? Or was there a crowd of them elsewhere, well apart from the colder-eyed Herring gulls?

Seapies - lovely name for vermillion-billed, pink-legged, black and white plumaged oystercatchers - were there by the hundred, scattered along the whole front.

They were almost unseen against the drab mud and flock of peewits as they stood, or squatted, or probed the substrate.

The browner juveniles - this year's hatch - with shorter crest - were easily seen among the better, brighter-plumaged adults.

Easily watched by telescope or binocular; though viewed by naked eye, peewit colours merged beautifully into the background except when the birds turned backside-on and bent to feed.

Then, the bright orange underpart was plain to see.

I wonder if this is a warning signal - like the white rabbit scut - with bright colour suddenly displayed as a flash signal whenever danger threatens?

More plovers (with stance and shape obvious), perhaps a dozen birds in all, stood apart from the darker plumaged lapwings.

Feathers glistened in the weakening sunlight as if dusted with gold, and on one bird breast I saw the fading black badge of summer plumage.

Goldies! The Golden plover, Pluvialis apricaria, the "Yellow Bird" of auld Scotland, a bird without which no grouse moor can ever be complete.

Were these down from Yorkshire or Northumbrian heather? From Scotland? Iceland? Norway? There was no way of telling.

I simply watched them through the telescope, delighting in their beauty.

Their spring song, a sweet and haunting whistle, was translated by the canny Scot a century and more ago as "Plough weel, sow weel, harrow weel!" Robbie Burns knew the bird well enough, but he wrote of the "...deep toned plover gray, wild whistling on the hill".

The real grey plover, Pluvcialis squatorola, is a winter visitor here - but one of the wide sands and saltings - never the moors or coastal fields.

In summer plumage the grey plover is silver backed - a superb counterpoint to the lovely goldie!