Organised by Hastings Youth Council, the event recognised many inspirational, talented and hard working individuals and organisations in the area.

The Mayor of Hastings, Cllr. Bruce Dowling, gave a short introduction and presented awards to the winners. Leader of Hastings Borough Council, Cllr. Jeremy Birch, also gave words of encouragement.

It’s been two weeks since I fell headfirst in love with the idea of microadventures.

A story I was writing (for this course) prompted me to Google “bivvy bags”. This article was the first hit, and it linked to a fantastic run-down of bivvy bags available in the UK. That in turn took me to the Alpkit Hunka product listing, which says “If Mr Microadventure himself, Alastair Humphreys, hasn’t yet persuaded you of the wonders of the bivvy bag lifestyle…” - so I found myself back on the first website I visited, looking at microadventures.

Within a couple of days, I was completely immersed in the online world of microadventure, watching every video I could find, digging deeper and deeper into the search results, and reading my way through numerous microadventure (and adventure) blogs. I ordered the bivvy bags.

While I was waiting for my parcel to arrive, Alastair issued a microadventure challenge. Before I had time to talk myself out of it, I’d committed myself and my partner to sleeping outside on one of the longest nights of the year in the company of a stranger from Twitter.

We met our microadventure buddy (I’ll call her Q) at an Italian restaurant and pored over an OS map of the area. We looked at hills, woods, trig points and fields, but ended up settling on our original idea: a trip to the seaside. After prosecco, pizza and hot chocolate, we drove off into the night.

Far across the water, houses shimmered with Christmas lights. Patches of yellow glow marked the location of towns over the horizon. We parked nearby and plunged into the dunes, finding a likely spot in a shallow dip of sand between the grass and shrubs. We unrolled our sleeping gear and rested on top of it for a while, staring up at the stars. I already knew Orion, rising to the east, but Q pointed out a few more constellations. We decided against pitching a tarp, brushed our teeth, stuffed our things into bin bags and jumped into bed.

I was prepared to lie awake for ages. The sand was not at all soft and my new inflatable foam pillow needed a fair bit of adjustment. But I was warm and full and the sound of the sea soon washed me to sleep.

I woke and slept and woke. The night was clear. Orion the Hunter strode across the heavens. Sea and sky bled into each other, stars becoming the lights of distant ships, blinking buoys becoming aeroplanes.

I slept and woke. My feet were cold despite two pairs of thick socks, my legs were cold despite thermal leggings and trousers, my fingers were cold. I battled with the drawcords on my sleeping bag and bivvy bag and pulled out my emergency supplies - a second jumper, gloves and a scarf (which I wrapped around my legs). I rubbed my feet against each other, got sand in my mouth trying to inflate my pillow a bit more, tossed and turned and counted my breath.

What was that? Something nudged my leg. It was only my partner’s feet. Before we’d set out, I’d read that people often feel more vulnerable in a bivvy bag than in a tent, but this wasn’t my experience. If there was a rustle, I could easily peep out of the bag to make sure it was just the wind.

From a strange dream, I woke to a light mist and the stars blinking between the clouds. I rolled onto my back and fine drizzle landed on my face. I decided I would get a better sleeping bag when money permitted. I’d bought mine for hostelling around Europe in the summer of 2005, and it was not up to the task of keeping someone warm in a bivvy bag in winter.

I dozed and woke and dozed. The first flock of seagulls flew over, squawking out their morning alarm. My partner and I left Q sleeping and went out onto the long, flat expanse of beach. In the distance, a dog walker with a head torch made a tiny pool of light on the dark sand. My stomach rumbled. We set up our camp stove, made instant porridge and hot drinks and watched the sky became lighter than the clouds.

It didn’t take long for the three of us to pack up, chatting about the night, about the pros and cons of our gear, about the sand that had inevitably managed to get into everything. We went into town for (second) breakfast and hot chocolate, then dropped Q off at the train station. When we got home, our bed had never looked so luxurious, warm and soft. We had a two hour nap.

Camber Sands evokes visions of sunny days, bright beach towels, fluorescent buckets and spades, children’s faces smeared the colour of ice lollies and adults’ shoulders stained lurid pink with sunburn. Tucked into the elbow-crook of the coastline before it reaches out to Dungeness, Camber offers the only decent stretch of sandy beach for miles, and summer crowds flock here accordingly.

But on this bleak November morning, it is almost deserted. A handpainted advertisement for deck chair hire recalls summers past; a grey wind whips in off the sea. We rug up and wander to the water over the rippled sand, weaving a pattern with our footprints. Here, at low tide, the sea recedes for hundreds of metres. As the sand dries out it’s blown inland by the prevailing wind to join the Camber dune system.

We dawdle west along the beach, looking at shells, seaweed and tidewrack from across the Channel, then clamber up into the dunes. We follow rabbit trails through microclimates of sound: here, the hiss of the sea and the wind; there, the chatter of birds on the golf course; now, a bowl of silence and deep-rooted marram grass pointing to a quiet sky. These dunes are gradually accreting, getting bigger. We make the heroic five-metre climb to the highest point and survey the landscape. 

A light mist smudges out the bulks of Dungeness nuclear power station and the cliffs at Fairlight, but Rye is clearly visible, and the harbour arm at the mouth of the River Rother juts out into the sea, black against the silvery water. These dunes were used for military training in the Second World War, and a number of fortifications are still visible on golf-course, some gazing resolutely out at the small platoon of wind turbines across the marsh, others subsiding drunkenly into the shrubs, perhaps still celebrating armistice.

This is a simple walk: turn right on the beach at Camber, then right again at the river, and it’s almost impossible to lose your way to Rye. 

A little egret - dazzling white against the tidal mud on the riverbank - picks a fight with a herring gull and wins. A line of birders gazes at a murmuration swooping and bending above Rye Harbour Nature Reserve. Undistracted by avian life, a closely-supervised toddler heaves stones into the river and cackles.

Near the Harbour Master’s office, the path joins a sealed road running on a dismantled narrow-gauge railway through the golf course. The Rye & Camber Tramway opened in 1895 to carry golfers to their sport and closed to the public in 1939. The rails are still visible at some points, and the brightly painted shack behind the Harbour Master’s office is the old station. 

At high tide, the wharf at Rye Harbour across the river has the capacity to take ships up to 90 metres long and sees imports and exports ranging from stone to talc to wheat. Today, it is quiet. We pass a pillbox stuffed to the ceiling with rubbish bags. A robin chases a chaffinch. We join National Cycle Network Route 2 for the final stretch into town.

At Rye, we linger over a delicious and well-deserved hot chocolate at Knoops (mine is infused with lavender), then find a viewpoint to look back over the walk. It’s hard to imagine, but several hundred years ago our entire route would have been underwater. Medieval maps show that Rye was originally located on a bay called the Rye Camber - from which Camber takes its name. Knowing what I do about global warming and rising sea levels, I wonder how long it will be until it is covered in water once again.