Beaches
Heacham started to become popular as a seaside resort with the Victorians due to the opening of the railway line between King's Lynn and Hunstanton in the early 1860s. This culminated in the building of the Jubilee Bridge in 1887 to replace an old wooden bridge as a result of oversubscriptions from parishioners in celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Heacham is still popular today as a seaside resort with both the North Beach (Jubilee) Road and South Beach Road being lined with caravan parks.
The beach at Heacham is situated on the east banks of The Wash; this means it is one of the few beaches in eastern England where the sun sets over the sea instead of over land. As such, with the right weather conditions, beautiful sunsets can be viewed.
On 29 July 1929 Miss Mercedes Gleitze became the first woman to swim the Wash. Originally aiming for Hunstanton she finally came ashore at Heacham after battling treacherous tides for over 13 hours.
Heacham was severely affected by the North Sea flood of 1953, where nine people died in the village, as a result of the sea breaking through its defences.
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Famous quotes containing the word beaches:
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)