The first walk is always a little disappointing. You cross the boardwalk expecting a view and find instead a long fold of pale sand and grass, the sea somewhere behind it, the wind doing most of the talking. Nothing announces itself. But the dunes are not empty. They are patient, and they ask the same of you. Give it ten minutes. Slow your feet. Let your eye drop from the horizon to the ground a metre ahead, and the whole place begins to declare itself.
Marram grass comes first, because it is everywhere, and because it is the reason for everything else. Its roots run for metres beneath you, stitching the loose sand into something that will hold a footprint, then a flower, then a bird. Follow the grass into the hollows and the small startlements begin. Sea holly, that improbable thistle-blue, flowering as though it had been dyed. A track of forked prints where a lark crossed at first light. Everlasting flowers gone papery and gold.
Learn to read the wind too, because the wind writes on the sand and rubs it out by afternoon. Ripples tell you which way the last gust came from. A smooth scoop on the sheltered side of a tussock is where the plovers settle; walk wide of it in spring, when there are eggs the exact colour of the ground. This is why we ask you to keep to the marked paths through the nesting months. It costs you almost nothing, and it is the difference, for a bird the size of your palm, between a season and no season at all.
Go out early, or go out late. The light is kinder then, and the heat has not yet flattened the resin-scent of the pines that hold the dunes along the landward edge. Take water; take little else. You will come back with sand in your shoes and salt on your skin and, if you have walked slowly enough, a short list of things you did not know were there an hour before. Nothing on it will be rare. That is rather the point. The dunes reward attention, not distance.