Volunteers save access to Seahouses beach with a dry stone wall

Storm Babet caused notable changes to the landscape on Seahouses beach, as it did on many other parts of the Northumberland coast.

Joy Marie and her partner were walking on the beach when they came across a woman filling bags of sand to support the steps by the Annstead dunes where sand had washed away.

The difficult task motivated the couple to help create a more robust solution with a dry stone wall to support the exposed side of the steps.

Joy said: “A thousand people go onto the beach at Seahouses every week, if not daily. After October's storms the dunes were eroded severely.

"The tank traps once hidden beneath the dunes, with one local telling me he hadn't seen them for 70 years, now stand isolated on the sand with the dunes now lost 10 metres behind them.

"The steps, once nestled between two dunes, are almost now completely exposed to the rising tides. If the steps erode further and drop, like some of the coastal path already, then all those thousands of feet will find new ways onto the beach and potentially cause more harm.”

A spokesperson from the National Trust, who own the beach, commented: “We’ve only recently been made aware of this. We’re delighted to see that there is local interest in maintaining beach access and are eager to link up with the local community on taking this forward.”

The task was a big one for just two people, as the stones couldn’t be taken from anywhere disruptive to nature and had to be taken from as far down the beach as possible. Luckily, they weren’t alone as members of the community helped by learning the skill and got to work.

Joy added: "It’s a huge drop so it's not it's not easy for people to get to the beach. If you're young or elderly or infirm, you need the pathway down which we know has been there over 55 years but it used to go between two dunes. Now, of course one side is completely eroded and in danger of falling and that'll be the last real access down onto the beach so we're trying to stop it from dropping the last part of the dune.”