The northern spit is not so much a place you arrive at as one that lets you approach. I say this because three times I set out from Crane's Ford with a clear sky, and three times the weather closed in at the exact same bend in the path — the place where the beech grove gives way to wind-scrubbed hawthorn and the ground turns from loam to a pale moss that crunches like old bone underfoot. The third time, I sat down and waited. And that was the trick: the fog lifted at the fourth hour, not because it was done with me, but because it had satisfied itself that I meant to stay.

What the spit holds, once you are admitted, is this: a coastline of dark slate cliffs veined with quartz, a beach of stones so rounded they look almost like eggs the sea forgot to hatch, and — most unexpected — a freshwater spring bubbling up from the centre of a salt marsh, utterly undrinkable by the look of it (bracken-choked, brown with peat) but as sweet as any I've tasted. The old maps I carry show no water here at all. They show a blank. That blank, I now know, is a ley-line crossing — the first I have found on this coast.

I have drawn the coastline below as faithfully as my hand can manage, with the ley-line marked in the palest ink — one almost invisible until you know to look for it, which seemed right. The spring I've marked with an open circle, because it gave freely and I think it should look that way on the page.

The plants of the spit are few and determined. The marsh itself grows a sedge I do not know — I have a pressed specimen and will draw it properly once it's dry enough to handle. On the cliffs, however, I found foxglove of a purple so deep it looks bruised, and three kinds of fern that grow right up to the edge of the salt. I collected fronds of each, and a single foxglove spike (leaving the rest to seed, as is right).

The foxglove I knew already, but the cliff spleenwort is new to me — it grows nowhere else on this coast that I've seen, and I suspect it follows the ley-line. I've added a note to Chapter IX (Saltmarsh Reaches) to cross-reference; the fern there is a different species entirely, but they share the same salt-tolerance charm, worked with slightly different gestures. A careful reader will want to compare.

There is more to say about the spit — the birds alone deserve their own page, and the way the light goes at evening is something I have not yet learned to draw — but a chapter must have a shape, and this one has found its. I will fill the margins as I return to it. A map is never finished; it only becomes truer.