Down in the sands, as the tide retreats you can still spot over-wintering and passing birds, such as the curlew.
A spokeswoman said: "It is high tide at the moment, so we won't know the full extent of the problem until the tide retreats later today.
There is a beach on the west coast of Wales where, as the tide retreats, strange shapes emerge from the sand.
Measuring about just a centimeter across, sand bubbler crabs can cover an entire beach in little sand balls within just a couple of hours after a tide retreats.
As soon as we waded into Cape Cod Bay, a roving horseshoe crab scurried past us in the rising tide, then retreated below.
The tide soon retreated with the dying days of the Wilson government – the collapse of the National Plan in 1967 and the weakening and then disappearance of the Department of Economic Affairs – and the vision thus imploded because the implementation mechanisms were lacking.
Like King Canute's sycophantic courtiers, who suggested their monarch was so powerful he could command the rising tide to retreat, the bill's backers would annul the laws of nature.
Not so in the vast intertidal zones of the Wadden Sea, those enormous tidal flats on the north coast of Germany, where the ebb tide often retreats as far as 10km.
Whether driven by fear – of death or litigation – ignorance, hope, or the imperative to "win" against disease at all costs, we sit as King Canute: foolishly, distressingly and impotently commanding the inexorable tide to retreat.
Perhaps the old political order won't collapse after all: perhaps "remember that bloke Farage and his real ale?" will be all we say about Ukip in 10 years; perhaps the SNP tide will retreat, the Greens will return to political irrelevance, and first-past-the-post will return to delivering stable majority governments.
