Published 2 June 2026
Lou Wagstaffe, photographer and guide behind Sea Hare Photography, has spent a lifetime by Jersey’s coast. But it took stepping off the shore and into the intertidal zone to better understand her place on the island and in the world.
William Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence, opens with the line, “To see the world in a grain of sand…”. An invitation to see the infinite in the infinitesimal, the piece implores the reader to use their imagination to see the wonder and beauty that exists in the everyday. Lou Wagstaffe may have never read the poem, but she lives, breathes and teaches its ethos.
Lou is the photographer and naturalist guide behind Sea Hare Photography, whose intertidal walks take small groups out into the zone between high and low water marks that most people cross without a second glance. She has spent years learning to look differently at this extraordinary, often overlooked world and now she makes it her work to help others do the same.
“You see the incredible interconnectivity of the world in a tiny space,” she says. “You focus on the tiniest things that can only be seen in certain conditions and contexts. When I’m down there I can forget about all the stuff that’s happening on the shore. It’s like stepping into another world.”
Her relationship with the sea goes back to childhood. Growing up on Jersey, her grandparents lived on the island’s south-east corner, and her father was always out on the water. The coast was simply part of the fabric of life. In 2018, when she left a career in the civil service after more than two decades, Lou asked herself two questions: what am I interested in, and what will get me outside? The answers led her back to the shoreline with her camera in hand and eyes newly open.
“I’ve always had a camera with me,” she says, “but as time has gone on I’ve become less focused on capturing photos and more focused on being present. The camera is still there, but I’m not looking for photos – I’m waiting for them to find me. In fact, sometimes I forget to take photos because I get so excited. Sometimes having the memory of what you see is better than the photo, because the photo just can’t replicate the feeling you’re left with.”
That instinct for patience and presence turns out to be exactly what her intertidal walks demand. It’s all too easy to miss the subtle delights of Jersey’s intertidal ecosystem if you’re moving too quickly.
“I always say to people: walk like a heron”, says Wagstaffe. “They watch where they put their feet and walk really gently. It not only reduces your impact on the environment, but also heightens one’s ability to observe and take notice.”
The reduction of our impact on the coast is incredibly important to Lou. Picking just one bit of marine life as an example, she describes the intricacies of the limpet. “It lives in one place all its life and creates what’s called a ‘home scar’. They’ll lay out a chemical trail along which they feed, but they always come back to that place because they can pull down and form a water tight seal on the surface. If that’s disturbed, its entire place within the wider ecosystem is upended. It’s understanding small things like this,” Lou explains, “that can help people to understand the bigger implications of seemingly tiny actions on our coast.”
For Lou, the fragility of what she’s showing people is never far from mind. “I’m so glad when the tide comes in,” she says. “It’s an opportunity for the coast to catch its breath.” Seeing herself, and those she guides, as custodians rather than visitors, Lou explains:
“It’s not so much ours to use as ours to understand and to look after. I aim to abide by the seashore code, seeing myself and those I take with me as observers, custodians and guardians. It’s about finding things as they are, not turning rocks over and tampering with the existing environment to create an experience. Small actions can have unintended consequences.”
Seeing the interconnectivity of her coastal home in action is a big contributor to Lou’s emphasis on it. “I see countless ‘Mint Sauce’ worms, which grow algae inside their bodies. This becomes a living part of themselves and the two organisms carry out photosymbiosis together in such a close relationship that they are actually called plant animals. Snakelocks anemones do the same, and are also heliotropic, like sunflowers. Despite having no eyes, they turn to follow the sun. They’re just plugged into the natural rhythm of our island.”
The wonder and passion in Wagstaffe’s voice when she describes all of this makes it easy to understand why friends, who joined her on her early walks along the Jersey Tidal Trial, were insistent that what she does needs to be shared. “It’s more than just a walk,” she enthuses.
For all the time Lou has spent on the coast, there is an irony at the heart of her story. Despite having grown up surrounded by water, she spent roughly thirty years without going into the sea. The relationship was one of admiration from a distance. She would not go on boats. She would not even look into the water. “Jaws 2 has a lot to answer for,” she says, with a laugh. It was only when she took up paddleboarding in 2013 that the spell was broken. “I decided it was the one chance I was going to give myself. I took to it like a duck – that doesn’t particularly like getting wet – to water in St. Catherine’s.”
She describes herself now as a “sea bobber and gobber”. The swimmer who was afraid of the water for decades has found her way back in. It feels, somehow, of a piece with everything else she does; the result of patient practice.
Lou can be found on the coast out in almost any weather. “It has to be blowing an absolute hooley for me to not want to be outside,” she insists. Some of her most extraordinary walks happen under the cover of darkness. During the wee hours, she and her attendees walk the parts of the Jersey Tidal Trail’s southern stretch in search of bioluminescence. The coast after midnight reveals things entirely invisible by day: creatures teeming in the shallows, life pulsing through the water, the whole intertidal shore alive in ways that daylight conceals. “I might have been up since midnight the previous day and be absolutely knackered, but as soon as I set foot onto the upper shore I feel energised – it’s such a good feeling. I’ll get home at three in the morning and can’t come down for hours.”
There is another layer to Lou’s experience of the coast, which goes beyond the Jersey Tidal Trail’s natural phenomena. Jersey’s intertidal zone is also, if you know where to look, a record of human presence stretching back further than almost anywhere else in the British Isles. Before the island found itself sandwiched between France and Great Britain, it was raised ground – a headland jutting into a river valley. In that time, the coastline has acted a little like a sieve, catching remnants from previous eras and preserving them for our inspection, awe and enjoyment. Marine sand in the cliffs, mammoth and wooly rhino remains in caves high above what is now our sea level; extraordinary objects marking centuries of history lie just beneath the surface and are still there to be discovered, as Lou testifies:
“I found a beautifully polished axe head randomly on one walk. I was with a group of people and we were en route to Seymour Tower. I went a slightly different way, looking down as I so often am on these walks and I saw this thing amongst a sea of stones. It’s beautiful – so tactile and the surface is incredible to touch. You can see where somebody, a person, has produced it all those centuries ago. It felt like a reminder that nature and time are out there doing their things and we, with all our tech, are being left behind in some respects.”
Just one of the many benefits of walking like a heron!
This perhaps represents one of the deepest ambitions behind Lou’s work. In a digital age where our experiences are uncoupled from a physical space, the intertidal zone offers something increasingly rare: a world that requires your full, physical, unhurried presence to reveal itself.
“All I can do is, step by step, person by person, try to get people to see things slightly differently,” Lou says. “I’m trying to change perspectives one walk at a time. I want people to be walking around these areas, rather than through them.”
Discover the Jersey Tidal Trail
Shaped by some of the world’s biggest tides, the Jersey Tidal Trail reveals an island in constant motion. Stretching for 48 miles around the coast, the route passes through sweeping bays, dramatic cliffs and vast intertidal landscapes alive with hidden detail – if you know how to look.
For guides like Lou Wagstaffe, the trail is more than a coastal route. It’s an invitation to slow down, walk like a heron and experience the island differently. Along its shoreline, bioluminescence flickers after dark, ancient artefacts emerge from the tide and tiny ecosystems thrive in rockpools beneath your feet.
Whether you explore a short stretch or take on the full island loop, the Jersey Tidal Trail offers a chance to reconnect with the natural rhythms of the coast – and to see the world between the tides.
