Countryfile – The Naze

Countryfile arrives at the Naze this week, as Anita Rani continues her east coast road trip along one of Britain’s fastest-changing shorelines. The nature reserve on the Essex coast loses around two metres of cliff every year, threatening habitats, homes, and centuries of heritage. Yet that same destruction delivers something remarkable in return. Every landslip peels back another page of a 55-million-year story, scattering shark teeth, fossilised shells, and wartime relics across the beach below.

This leg of the Countryfile 2026 road trip captures the strange bargain at the heart of the Naze. The sea takes land, and in exchange it hands over treasure. Anita joins veteran fossil hunter Peter Dimmick and a beach full of young enthusiasts searching for megalodon teeth. She climbs the 300-year-old Naze Tower with the man fighting to keep it out of the water. She also steps inside one of Walton’s thousand-plus beach huts for tea, memories, and a masterclass in English seaside country life.

Along the way, the Countryfile archives open up hidden histories from across the British landscape. Gold still glitters in Scottish rivers. First World War trenches survive beneath Sherwood Forest. D-Day rehearsals left their mark on a Dorset heath, and a Bronze Age village nicknamed Britain’s Pompeii emerged from a Cambridgeshire quarry. Together, they show how much of our past lies just beneath the surface, waiting for wind, wave, or fire to reveal it.

Driving up the coastal road towards the Naze, Anita gets the full force of the setting. Nothing but horizon and ocean fills the windscreen. However, that exposure explains exactly why this stretch of Essex struggles so badly with coastal erosion. Wild winds and stormy seas batter the cliffs constantly, and the geology beneath offers little resistance.

Peter Dimmick, a local fossil hunter and amateur palaeontologist who has volunteered in the area for 50 years, explains the mechanism with striking clarity. Rainfall does most of the damage. Water sinks through the top two layers of the cliff until it hits the London clay, which is far less permeable. Because that clay is slippery, the saturated layers above simply slide off. Wave action then carries away the fallen sediment, and the cycle begins again.

The cliff face reads like a diagram of deep time. Roughly two metres of Thames sand and gravel sit on top. Beneath that lies the red crag, an orange band reaching up to 15 metres deep here. Everything underneath is London clay. During Anita’s visit, a section gives way in front of them. It looks like a big old landslide, and Peter warns that large chunks genuinely do come down without notice.

The most vivid measure of loss stands on the beach itself. A Second World War pillbox and three gun emplacements rest on the sand, tilted and stranded. Soldiers built them on top of the cliff, nowhere near the edge. They slid down in the early 1970s. That much land has vanished in roughly 50 to 60 years, and the pace has only quickened since.

Countryfile – The Naze

55 Million Years of History in One Fossil Collection

Before heading down to the beach, Anita examines a decade of Peter’s finds, every piece gathered from this single stretch of shore at Walton. The collection makes an immediate impression. Most visitors search for the small fossil teeth, and Peter shows her a sand tiger shark’s tooth between 52 and 55 million years old. Anita jokes that it sounds young.

Then comes the showstopper. Sitting in the display is a genuine megalodon tooth, and Anita can barely resist picking it up. Nearby, Peter places a modern whelk shell beside a fossil one, around two to three million years old. Stood upright together, the difference jumps out. The fossil’s opening sits on the opposite side. Very few left-handed shells exist anywhere in the world today, which makes this specimen genuinely rare. Another stone, examined closely, reveals the delicate outline of a crab.

For Peter, the appeal never fades. The excitement lies in never knowing what might turn up. Some days deliver hours of searching and almost nothing. Other days produce something outstanding. That uncertainty, he says, keeps people coming back for decades.

The fossils also tell a bigger story about nature and change. When the red crag formed, a shallow sea covered this coastline. The London clay fossils record something stranger still. Essex once resembled modern Indonesia, subtropical and thick with mangroves and palm trees, lying beneath about 200 metres of water while sharks cruised overhead. As Anita puts it, the collection reminds us what a blip in Earth’s history we really are. Peter agrees, and adds a point that shapes the whole episode: natural change has always been part of this coast.

That perspective informs his surprisingly calm view of the erosion. He calls it an ongoing process. Erosive conditions dominate at certain times, while sediment builds up at others. Importantly, if engineers walled off the entire coastline, the fossils would stop appearing. For Peter, that loss would be the sadder outcome.

Fossil Hunting on Naze Beach With the Next Generation

Down on the shore, Peter runs a fossil-hunting workshop for children on behalf of Essex Wildlife Trust, and Anita joins the search. The rules matter here. Everything lying on the beach belongs to whoever finds it, but digging into the cliff is forbidden. The Naze holds Site of Special Scientific Interest status, so the cliff face itself stays untouched. Whatever the sea delivers, however, is fair game.

The children need no encouragement. One young hunter presents a possible worm cast that Peter identifies as a pyrite nodule, the very mineral that turns wood into fossil, possibly with fossilised wood at its centre. Another finds a shell so pretty Anita suggests it belongs on a necklace. Meanwhile, a parent watching her children search reflects that she did exactly this as a child, and bringing them back lets her relive it.

Anita, by contrast, struggles. She has never found a fossil in her life, despite following Peter’s advice to look for glints in the sun rather than the shade. Sympathetic children start quietly handing her their spare finds. She accepts, swears them to secrecy, and keeps looking.

Then seven-year-old Orin steals the show. He finds a sand tiger shark’s tooth, 52 to 55 million years old, entirely on his own. Asked why fossil hunting matters, he delivers the line of the episode. Without fossils, he says, we would think we were the first people on Earth. We would know nothing about the past. Anita, visibly delighted, sees a new generation of geologists taking shape in front of her. At the end of the session, so many children have found teeth that Peter hands spares to the few who missed out. Anita, still empty-handed, admits she is too embarrassed to reveal her bucket.

Countryfile Archives: Panning for Gold in Scotland’s Highest Village

The first dip into the Countryfile archives travels north, to Wanlockhead, Scotland’s highest village. Sean visited a few years ago to discover why fortune hunters have flocked there for generations. The answer lies underground. Rich deposits of lead, zinc, copper, and gold shaped the village’s remote setting, and today an annual gold panning championship celebrates that mineral wealth. The stakes remain real. Back in 2015, an amateur prospector found a nugget worth £10,000.

Professional gold panner Leon Kirk shows Sean a collection of Scottish river gold, including one nugget he values at around £15,000 if it ever sold. It never will. Leon compares nuggets to children and asks, quite reasonably, whether anyone would sell theirs. He also refuses to reveal which river produced them. Every panner guards their secret patches fiercely.

Leon quickly punctures any dream of quitting the day job. This kind of find is as rare as it comes. Ninety-nine per cent of panners recover very little gold. Anyone covering the cost of their sandwich has done well. You pan because you love it, he says, or you just get cold and miserable.

The pair work a sluice, which processes gravel 20 times faster than a pan by using the river’s own energy. Heavy material drops into ridges called riffles, and the top riffles soon turn red with haematite, the iron ore that signals where gold hides. Leon’s philosophy carries the whole scene: the next scoop can change your life. He has believed that all his life. Centuries ago it was almost true here. In the 12th and 13th centuries, people picked nuggets straight off the bank. Now, as Leon admits, prospectors chase the dregs, flakes the size of midges.

An hour in, Sean finds his first-ever gold. It is a speck of flood gold, so small he nearly loses it in the pan, and it will never pay off a mortgage. Even so, it lights Leon up, as every flake does. Since filming, Leon has found two new Scottish rivers producing good-sized nuggets. Naturally, the locations remain top secret.

The First World War Trenches Hidden Beneath Sherwood Forest

The archives then turn to Sherwood Forest, where Margherita explored a very different buried history on a springtime visit in 2023. Beneath the birdsong lies the training ground of Clipstone Camp, where men prepared for the front lines of the First World War. A century ago, gunfire and explosions shattered this now tranquil woodland.

Archaeologist Lawrence Shaw stands with her in a communication trench, part of an astonishing 62 kilometres of training trenches recently mapped through a large remote-sensing exercise. The survey has completely revolutionised understanding of the site. Clipstone operated from 1915 until 1920, with upwards of 30,000 soldiers stationed there at any one time. The trenches vary deliberately. Some feature beautifully crenelated front lines, the jagged firing positions soldiers would man. Others may have served as dug-outs or headquarters. Communication trenches ran at an angle to those facing the enemy, moving men, equipment, and food. Their narrowness strikes Margherita immediately, given the thousands who squeezed through them.

The landscape itself has lived several lives. Before the military arrived, open heathland stretched here with barely a tree in sight. The war brought noise and 30,000 men. Afterwards, foresters planted trees over the whole site, and today cyclists and campers use it for recreation. Four or five different land uses in barely a hundred years.

For Forestry England ranger Lindsey McCulloch-Howe, who shows Margherita the recreated trenches, the site is personal. She stumbled across her grandfather’s war record in the National Archive and found it written there: demobbed back to Clipstone Camp on 1 February 1919. He died when she was 16, before she thought to ask him anything, a silence she still regrets. For some of the young men who trained here and never came home, she says, these trenches are their memorial. That is why the team protects them. Since filming, they have excavated three separate trench sites and continue to recover artefacts connected to the soldiers.

Walton-on-the-Naze, the Unofficial Beach Hut Capital of Essex

Not every hidden history lies underground. Some are woven into places families return to year after year. Back on the Essex coast, Anita heads into Walton-on-the-Naze itself, home to over a thousand beach huts and the unofficial beach hut capital of Essex. Rows of brightly coloured huts stretch in every direction, overlooking the North Sea on a perfect sunny day of buckets, spades, and ice creams.

The huts carry a long lineage. From as early as the 18th century, their ancestors were known as bathing machines. Horses dragged them on wheels to the water’s edge so swimmers could undress inside and preserve their Victorian modesty. The usage has changed entirely. The nostalgia has not.

Nobody embodies that better than local resident Sue Mann, who welcomes Anita in with a cup of tea. Her hut has been in the family for at least 80 years. These days it hosts morning coffees and dog walks when the tide allows. Her childhood here was busier. She describes bouncing a ball on a penny for points, trips to the pier, whispered romances, and big games of cricket with the locals once the visitors had gone home.

Then she brings out the photographs. One from 1973 shows Sue at nine or ten with her mother, her brother, and the family hut. Her father appears alongside his own mother. The memories overwhelm her for a moment. Her dad died at 57, her mum at 60, and the hut became her emotional anchor. It took her a long time even to redecorate it. Four rubber rings still hang inside, belonging to her daughter, now 40, and her brother’s three children, who still float out on them together.

The hut has no running water beyond a tap around the corner, and no electricity. Sue would not change it. However you feel when you arrive, she says, the view and the sound of the sea make you forget everything else. Anita calls it a special memory capsule, quintessentially English, holding the past and present of seaside country life. Sue hopes it holds the future too. The visit ends the only way it could, with laughter and a hunt for the gin.

Exercise Smash: The Countryfile Archive Story of D-Day’s Dorset Rehearsal

Time capsules sit all around our landscape, and some record monumental moments. The archives revisit Anita’s trip to Dorset, where 80 years earlier the biggest seaborne operation the world has ever seen took shape. By 1944, this part of the country had become a vast training ground. Planners chose Studland Bay for its similarity to the Normandy beaches, and from 4 to 20 April 1944, Allied troops rehearsed the D-Day landings under the codename Exercise Smash.

Major Retired Graeme Green of the Royal Dragoon Guards keeps his regiment’s role in that story alive. The first exercise, Smash I, rehearsed the assaulting troops who would break in off the beaches, including the swimming tanks of the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards, the assaulting squadrons for Gold Beach on D-Day. Here, for the first time, they lined up, swam in, landed, and practised breaking through German defences.

Behind them stands an observation point built by Canadian engineers in 1943. The list of visitors is extraordinary. King George VI, Winston Churchill, and Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower all watched the preparations from this bunker. Inside, Graeme describes what they saw: the sea covered horizon to horizon with ships and landing craft, infantry behind, aircraft above, artillery behind that. Over 17 days, tens of thousands of troops took part in four full dress rehearsals. By the end, the soldiers said they felt as prepared for D-Day as they possibly could be.

Half a mile west, the story continues underground. Two years before Anita’s visit, a wildfire burnt seven acres of training land and revealed glimpses of the past. National Trust volunteer archaeologist Pam White walks her through a landscape scattered with shrapnel, including a driving band from a Sea Mattress rocket. Her bag of finds includes 80-year-old sandbags, a tiny two-inch mortar, a larger four-inch version, and a couple of dozen more like them recovered across the site.

One object changes the register entirely. A cigarette tin, Churchman’s No1, twenty-five smokes. Somebody’s dad sat here smoking, Pam says, and suddenly the ordnance becomes people. Without places like Studland, she believes, D-Day would never have succeeded. The urgency now is time. These fragile traces will disappear quickly unless volunteers find and record them, and the landscape still gives up new details of the build-up to D-Day.

The Naze Tower and the Fight to Turn the Tide

Back at the Naze, Anita meets David Eagle, chairman of the Naze Protection Society, for a climb up the 111 steps of the Naze Tower. The tower has stood as a beacon on this shifting coastline for over 300 years. Built in 1720 as a navigational aid for ships heading up the Thames and along the coast, it passed to its current owners in 2004. Today it houses an art gallery and museum, hosts events, and serves as the undisputed icon of Walton as a tourist town.

The view from the top delivers perspective in every sense. It also reveals the threat. Extreme erosion now gnaws at the cliffs beneath the tower, including a landslide earlier this year. Consequently, the community organised. The Naze Protection Society formed in 1997, and local people raised a quarter of a million pounds to build Crag Walk, a 110-metre rock platform stabilising the cliff. David states it plainly: without Crag Walk, the tower would already be in the sea.

The numbers behind his urgency are stark. The coast lost 22 metres between 2016 and 2021. David believes his generation will witness the greatest change of all, driven by more frequent and more powerful storms. Harder wave energy strips material from the cliffs faster than ever before.

Yet the Naze sits inside a genuine dilemma. Its SSSI designation requires the cliffs to erode, because erosion reveals the fossils and the geology that make the site scientifically precious. Anita has just watched children thrive on exactly that process. On the other hand, a magnificent 300-year-old tower stands exposed and at risk. Does the fight ever feel futile? David’s answer defines coastal country life. Do nothing, and you know the result. Local money is scarce, but passion is not, and he believes coastal communities are the most passionate of all. The Naze, he insists, will be here for decades to come. Anita’s response is simpler: savour it while you can.

Must Farm, Britain’s Pompeii, and a 3,000-Year-Old Time Capsule

Wind and waves unearth the Naze’s treasures. In Cambridgeshire, fire did the work, as John discovered on a 2023 archive visit to Must Farm, the Bronze Age settlement nicknamed Britain’s Pompeii. Around 3,000 years ago, wooden roundhouses stood on stilts over an ancient river here. A sudden, unplanned fire sent them collapsing into the water, possessions and all. Silt and then peat sealed everything, locking a single moment in time.

Excavation leader Mark Knight calls it an archaeologist’s perfect scenario. The discovery itself came by chance in the late 1990s, when a local man fishing at a quarry reservoir spotted timbers protruding from the side. Dating confirmed a Bronze Age origin, and the dig ran from summer 2015 to the end of summer 2016. Instead of the usual two post holes and a potsherd, the team uncovered the entire hamlet and the complete contents of a household. Mark describes it as doing anthropology rather than archaeology, and admits the daily discoveries were almost overwhelming.

The objects tell the story of the fire itself. A pot shows its original black colour on the sheltered side and bleached, spalled clay where flames struck it. Inside were carbonised food remains, analysed to reveal venison, fish, and honey. Another pot still held charred food with a spoon stuck in it, a meal abandoned mid-bite. There was a real sense of menu, Mark says, and a real sense of the moment everything stopped.

At the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, lead archaeologist Chris Wakefield shows John the rarest survivors. A tiny cup, half the size of a chicken egg, may represent a child learning to make their first pot, extraordinary evidence of children in the historical record. An alder trough hints that builders chose rot-resistant wood deliberately for their wet world. Part of a bronze sword carries notches, possibly from combat, possibly from the Bronze Age practice of deliberately breaking weapons before depositing them in rivers as an act of belief.

The most astonishing find is a charred bobbin of flax thread, its fibres roughly 0.4 millimetres in diameter, one of 40 such objects recovered. Something that delicate surviving 3,000 years beneath the earth left even the archaeologists second-guessing themselves. The dig has changed how experts view the Bronze Age, and touching these objects means being the first person to do so since their owners. Work continues, and the team has since built a 3D model of the settlement as it once stood.

Signs of the Seasons: Enter the Countryfile Calendar 2027 Competition

From the beach, John also launches this year’s photographic competition in aid of BBC Children In Need. The theme is Signs of the Seasons, celebrating the moments that capture the feel of the countryside through the year. Entrants can shoot fresh summer images or dig through their galleries for winter, autumn, and spring shots they are proud of. New life finding its feet, seasonal spectaculars, nature’s miraculous details, brooding skies, golden light, and dramatic weather all fit the brief.

Twelve selected photographs will star in the Countryfile Calendar for 2027, sold in support of BBC Children In Need. Viewers will then choose the overall winning image, which takes the calendar cover and earns its photographer a £1,000 gift card for photographic equipment. The judges’ favourite receives a £500 gift card.

The rules are straightforward. Each entrant may submit up to three photographs fitting the theme. Pictures must have been taken in the UK, the Channel Islands, or the Isle of Man, and only online entries qualify. Professional photographers and images that have already won national or international competitions cannot enter. Beyond the prizes, the competition captures what Countryfile does every week: turning ordinary views of rural and agricultural life into images worth stopping for.

A Coastline That Gives As Much As It Takes

By the end of her day at the Naze, Anita has toured millions of years in a few miles of Essex coastline, from prehistoric sharks to seaside childhoods. Her conclusion centres on the people rather than the geology. This community is adaptable. They are fiercely proud of their coastline and determined to protect it, yet pragmatic too, because living beside the North Sea demands nothing less.

That pragmatism echoes through every story in the episode. Peter accepts the erosion that feeds his fossil collection. David fights it where heritage stands in the way. Sue simply keeps the kettle on and the memories alive. Meanwhile, wildlife thrives on a shoreline that refuses to stand still, and children learn that nature’s destruction can double as a history lesson. Countryfile finds the Naze at a genuine turning point, losing ground faster than ever while revealing more of itself than at any time in living memory.

The road trip is not finished. Fifty miles up the road waits Anita’s final and most eerie stop yet: Orford Ness, a deserted landscape at the literal end of the road. She cannot wait to get onto the island, and neither can we. For anyone who loves country life, coastal wildlife, and the layered history beneath British agricultural landscapes, Countryfile 2026 has saved something strange and special for last.

FAQ Countryfile – The Naze