In my four decades in Essex, I have avoided Jaywick on all but a very few occasions. Regularly cited as one of the most left-behind spots of the country, it does little to dispel that image with low-rise housing, much of it wooden, cowering behind the sea wall and now clad in forlornly tattered flags of St George…

And indeed, why would it ever pick itself up? Deep in the flood risk zone (it was very badly affected by the 1953 Great Flood, with 35 villagers dead out of the English total of 305), all it would take is a substantial surge for it all to be washed away. Again. Not a recipe for investing in real estate, the fate of edgelands the world over.

But there have been attempts to address this, with Norwegian stone and dredged sand enhancements to the sea defences repeatedly over the past 20 years, hence most of my previous trips there, advising on the environmental implications thereof. The defences may have been improved, the risk reduced, but without a sign of it coming up in the world to my eye. It seems entrenched by its own self-image and lack of ambition, and arguably the judgemental views of infrequent incomers like me…

So why was I there last week? The sea defences have created some remarkable beach and dune habits, rivalling any such coastal sands in the county. The sand has been colonized by Marram, Sea-holly and Sea Spurge, while the more stable areas are now a thicket of Sea-buckthorn, all the vegetation playing its part in sustaining the defences. Lose the roots, lose the sand and lose the protection: this shouldn’t need saying, but apparently there are those who would strip the beach back to bare, mobile sand because ‘the beach looks scruffy’….

Earlier this year, parts of the beach were found to be supporting vast numbers of snails, in the summer cladding the stems of Sea-holly and Sea-buckthorn: this discovery will be reported in detail by Simon Taylor and David Bain in the next edition of the Essex Naturalist, due in December. Such aestivating aggregations are believed to raise the snails away from the severe heat stress conditions of the sand surface, a phenomenon I am very familiar with from my travels round the Mediterranean, but never here.

So I thought I would go and see for myself. Sadly it was not to be: the previous few days had been wet and cool, and I was met not by the sight of the branches clad in snails but of thousands of snails on the move in the respite from ferocious drought.

But what is most significant is that the commonest snail by far was Theba pisana, the White Snail or Sandhill Snail, often striped brown, and usually with a delicate rose-pink flush around its aperture. There were a few examples of the rather similar Striped Snail Cernuella virgata, smaller and generally lacking the pink, together with the larger, browner Garden Snail Cornu aspersa.

While Cornu is ubiquitous, and Cernuella is common enough in calcareous and coastal regions of England, Theba seems not to have been recorded hitherto in the wild anywhere between Dorset and Northumberland. But with such huge numbers, including juveniles, it seems to be successfully established for the moment, although perhaps at the mercy of severe frosts.

The finders’ theory is that it was inadvertently introduced with Marram plants imported from Normandy by the Environment Agency: this country is notoriously poor at biosecurity measures, despite the natural advantages of being an island. That being the case, Theba has likely been present for at least 15 years. As good as reason as any to venture out to Jaywick!