Pinewoods full of red squirrels behind a huge wild beach and shifting dunes on the Sefton coast north of Liverpool
Formby is a rare thing so close to a big city: a genuinely wild-feeling stretch of coast, all pinewoods, mobile dunes and a beach that seems to go on forever. The pinewoods are the place to look for red squirrels, which hang on here in one of their last English strongholds. Early morning is your best bet, and keep dogs close. The dunes behind the beach are among the most important in the country, home to natterjack toads and a good deal else besides.
Two things reward a bit of looking. At low tide, patches of the foreshore expose beds of ancient mud stamped with footprints — human and animal — left on the shore thousands of years ago and uncovered again by the sea. And the flat land behind was once asparagus country; you can still make out the old fields if you know they’re there.
The beach itself is free and open any time, though the National Trust car park has a charge and fills up fast on hot weekends, so come early or come off-season. It sits right on the King Charles III England Coast Path, and the dunes run north into the Ainsdale Sand Dunes reserve. A few miles south at Crosby, Another Place plants a hundred cast-iron Gormley figures along the tideline, an easy add-on to a Formby day.
