Suffolk's shingle beaches are home to many treasures and provide a rare habitat for a variety of vegetation. Expert beachcomber Kate Osborne explains what to look for next time you're at the water's edge...

We’ve a lot of shingle beaches in Suffolk – so many in fact that we might take them for granted, or complain that they hurt our feet or are rubbish for sandcastles at high tide.
But did you know that beaches like ours are only found in three places in the world? They are known as Vegetated Shingle Habitat and the plants that live here are specially adapted to the desert-like conditions. The stones hide many treasures and some are even treasures in their own right!
Some beachcombing finds are common to every beach and some finds are more common than others. What is surprising is that beaches a short distance apart can be good for beachcombing very different things.
Seaweed often marks the high tide line on the beach and is often the best place to look for treasures.
There are over 650 species of seaweed in the UK. Seaweed, along with driftwood, is critically important to the food chain of the beach, providing shelter and food for tiny little bugs on the beach, that bring in the beetles and spiders we may see, which in turn provide food for birds and mammals. Explore the seaweed – but please always leave it on the beach.

Felixstowe beach is brilliant for beachcombing. It’s great if you have limited mobility or very young children, as there are lots of old concrete groynes and the promenade to sit on. There are tons of treasures here – you should be able to find at least 15 different species of shells including:
• Limpets, which have their teeth on their tongue, will grind their shell for a perfect fit to make a home ‘scar’. They return to this every time the tide goes out and await its return when they will graze on algae on the rocks.
• Slipper limpets which are born as males but then become females.
• Fossil sharks’ teeth. As sharks can have up to 3,000 teeth at any one time and up to 30,000 in their lifetime there are plenty to be found and a huge variety to look for, from long and thin to squat and triangular.
Other natural treasures include square, black mermaids’ purses which are the egg cases of skates and rays, and sea wash balls, which look like clumps of Rice Krispies and are the egg cases laid by common whelks. The first few whelks that hatch out will cannibalise their siblings as they are the first available food source.

Bawdsey beach is stunning and wild, full of shingle plants with white lines of common whelk shells marking the tide line. There’s a great mix of beachcombing treasures to be found, especially:
• Top shells, which were used by the Victorians for buttons.
• Mud with holes in. The holes are made by a rock-boring piddock which spends its entire life in the mud, sticking up a feeding tube when it gets peckish.
Few top shells or examples of mud with holes in make it further down the coast to Felixstowe beach.
• Sea glass is essentially pretty litter. Once the glass has passed the point of being lethally sharp, it is smoothed by the stones and the waves and becomes frosted sea gems, much loved by collectors and crafters. You will always find sea glass where you find people.
• Bawdsey Quay beach is another good spot for fossil sharks’ teeth too!

Sizewell beach is superb for shingle plants and, further along it, there’s a chance of finding chunks of coralline crag - a reddish-brown local shelly sand. This is 2-3million years old and full of fossils, including shells and small organisms. Sizewell is great for:
• Hag stones (or stones with holes all the way through them). Historically thought to protect you from the ‘hag of the night’ giving you nightmares, hag stones are generally perceived as lucky and so are hung in long strings on boats, in homes and beach huts.
• Driftwood is another beautiful find but should always be left on the beach unless it’s full of nails or heavily painted, in which case it needs to go into the bin. Wood found on the beach is often full of holes, the small ones caused by something similar to a wood louse, called a gribble. The large tunnels, often lined with a white chalky substance, are caused by shipworm; not a worm at all, but a pair of shells with a body too long to be contained within them.
• Crab and lobster claws, and shells, are often found in pieces. Both shed their hard outer bodies as they grow. Lobsters eat theirs to reclaim the calcium, so lobster claws you find on the beach may well be the remains of someone’s picnic!

For more information on Kate and her events, see: www.beachbonkers.org.uk