Rust & Racing Whelks: A Day at Hunstanton
- Su France
- Dec 28, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 7
The Hunstanton Red Cliffs: A Geological Journey of Colour and Inspiration
A Seafront Walk for Textile Work Inspiration
Boxing Day 2025 offered me a chance to journey to Hunstanton's South Beach from my Lincolnshire home.
As I strolled along the seafront towards the cliffs, I noticed several people clutching hot chocolates. One brave soul even enjoyed a giant ice cream despite the morning chill. No judgment here; I contemplated having one myself for quite a while! Eventually, I descended some steps, and there it was—the multi-coloured cliff, a stunning reminder of England's geological diversity.
As the morning progressed, the beach filled with Boxing Day walkers, and the cliffs provided a striking backdrop. One dog, with patches of brown and cream fur, camouflaged against the striated cliff face, made us smile.
While the promenade bustled with holiday visitors seeking doughnuts and fresh air after a day of celebrating, the early morning beach offered a quieter time. Here, the rocks basked in the low winter sun, illuminating the subtle variations in the carrstone—from deep russet to pale ochre.
Between the tideline and the cliff base, the retreating water had carved intricate, dendritic patterns into the sand—those beautiful tree-like formations that appear when water takes the path of least resistance around rocks and through sediment.
The famous Hunstanton cliffs revealed a spectacular geological sequence. A distinctive rust-red carrstone (iron-rich sandstone) formed the base layer, overlain by red chalk, and crowned with white chalk at the summit.
The carrstone, deposited during the Lower Cretaceous period approximately 100-115 million years ago, was formed in a shallow marine environment. At this time, the region lay submerged beneath warm, tropical seas. They didn’t look quite so tropical on the day we visited!
I've wanted to visit for at least a year or two, and we couldn't have picked a better day!
Standing before these cliffs, I found myself captivated not just by their scientific story but also by the way light caught the iron oxides. Subtle shifts from russet to ginger, then to burnt sienna and raw umber—these pigments carried such richness in colour.
People obviously feel creative in such places. Recent cliff falls had exposed fresh faces of these ancient rocks, and some creative beachcombers had balanced fragments of the white chalk into stone stacks, creating a mini sculpture park.
Thank you to those who crafted the stacks so carefully; I loved them.
Tracing the Carrstone Seam: From Lincolnshire to Norfolk
The journey from Lincolnshire to Hunstanton represents more than just a road trip across to East Anglia; it traces a rare geological connection across what was once a continuous shallow sea floor.
The carrstone seam that appears at Oxcombe, where I had collected red clay earlier in the month, reappears along the North Norfolk coast at Hunstanton and is part of the same formation. I have also discovered that it is remarkably rare to find this distinctive layer exposed at the surface.
Both locations share similar mineral compositions and ages, with the iron-rich sediments deposited in comparable shallow marine to coastal environments, where iron concentrations were unusually high.
My practice involves understanding these connections—not just through research and field trips but physically, through the act of collecting, grinding, and binding pigment.
I believe that knowing where colour comes from changes how you use it on linen or paper. There's a weight of place and time that earth pigments carry with them.
Understanding the Geological Connection
The key difference between the Norfolk and Lincolnshire locations lies in how the sediments have weathered. At Oxcombe, the iron-rich material has broken down into workable soil and earth pigments, while at Hunstanton, the same geological seam has been preserved as consolidated rock, hardened by pressure and cementation over geological time scales.
Unlike the softer, soil-based iron-rich deposits found at Oxcombe in Lincolnshire, the Hunstanton carrstone has been cemented and lithified into hard rock over millions of years. This makes it unsuitable for pigment extraction but spectacular as a geological monument.
When researching, I had to look up ‘lithified,’ so if I lost you there, I apologise. It means to transform sediment into stone—new knowledge for me too!
I noticed how the chalky whites and iron reds pulse against each other, complementary colours that nature arranged millions of years before colour theory was a thing.
My dad would have loved this place; he had an eye for landscapes where geology is dramatic. I will tell you about a limestone pavement quiz with him and my husband some other time.
Connecting Art, Earth, and Deep Time
When I apply Oxcombe earth to linen, knowing it shares a birthplace with these dramatic coastal cliffs, the work becomes a form of mapping.
I think artists are natural noticers. We spend time observing and then observing again whatever fascinates us—whether that's a particular colour combination, a recurring shape, the way forms echo one another, or how morning light differs from afternoon light. Even how a dog's coat can accidentally mirror the geology behind it.
It's these small observations that feed into how I think about composition and colour in my earth pigment on textiles work.
A Winter Encounter with More than Ancient Landscapes
Later on, I became so focused on the sand patterns, racing whelks creating interesting sand marks, and time-weathered rocks that I was oblivious to a possible proposal happening in the distance. I wonder if the answer was 'yes'?
These patterns echo the bedding planes (you know, those geography lessons from when you were a teenager) in the cliffs themselves—both shaped by water, though one vanishes with the tide while the other has lasted a hundred million years.
As we left, the low winter sun descended, turning the carrstone into dramatic segments.
I didn't collect any samples—sometimes it's enough just to see where the colour comes from.
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