I need your help.

I’m planning on running a 55km (34mile) route along the Norfolk Coast Path from Great Yarmouth to Cromer, all to raise money for New Routes Integration. New Routes are a charity based in Norwich who work to support refugees, migrants and asylum seekers. They promote cross cultural integration and community awareness. The UK’s coastline is a beautiful, restless mingling of land and sea, which challenges our understanding of linear borders. It’s wild and variable ecosystems provide equal risk and reward for plant, animal, and human communities. Many people have arrived on these shores in search of hospitality, safety, survival. We all have a part to play in making our shores, our cities, our communities as welcoming as possible.

Norfolk dissolves into the sea like warm breath into a winter’s morning. Stoic cliffs conceal buried relics of a time before humans. Ribbons of desolate shingle stretch out as far as the eye can see. The marshes play tricks on the mind; part water, part earth. A greying of the landscape in the liminal, littoral zone.

Berries and apples linger in the windswept hedgerows despite winter’s grip. Birds, insects, fish, and amphibians, some endemic to these marshes, thrive in conditions which pose a challenge not only for boats and birdwatchers, but for long distance runners too.

Trying to find the line between land and sea amidst all this moisture and earth and organic matter is a fruitless effort.

This liminality questions the certainty with which we talk about our borders. An island nation, we are used to a clean opposition between the land on our shoreline, and what lies out of sight, across the ocean. Yet Norfolk’s marshes embody a state of constant flux, despite our best attempts of building linear flood defences. To me, the marshes are a reminder of the fact that our construction of borders, of nationhood, is based on arbitrary assumptions.

When people journey across land and sea, often out of desperation, to reach these beautiful shores, it is our assumptions which determine what greeting awaits them.

I will run the Coast Path with the intention of interrogating these assumptions. I have confidence in our collective creativity, intelligence, and compassion, to be able to make the small choices necessary to make our communities inclusive and welcoming spaces.

We all have a part to play in this effort. Whether it’s donating what you can afford, sharing this page with someone, or using this as an opportunity to turn a critical eye inward, overwriting our assumptions with small, intentional acts, everything helps.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

Best wishes,

Finlay Porter