When I want to clear my head, I like to get out into the wild and walk; not so much escaping from things as escaping into things. There can be no doubt that my favourite place to do this is the North Norfolk Coast, and even though I have been returning there now for over 20 years my passion for it remains as vibrant as ever.

Eastern Daily Press: Barn owl: One of David Gray's favourite birds.Barn owl: One of David Gray's favourite birds. (Image: Archant)

To head out onto the coast is to enter into a landscape of dramatic horizontals, and chasing skies; a place of constant shift and change that is continually shaping and reshaping, making and unmaking itself.

Wind, water, sand, cloud, mudflat, scrub and meadow; its power as a landscape doesn't come from its landmarks or its geological mass but rather from the opposite. Its dreaminess, its mutability. It also has a unique and very particular sense of wildness. This seems to emanate from the marsh itself. A brooding no-man's-land, alive with the sounds of calling birds and huge flocks of geese.

To walk the paths along the flood defences and drink in the majesty of this widescreen world is to discover also an accompanying sense of unbounded freedom; like intimations of limitless space. From the dreamy intimacy of its dunes to the exhilarating expanses of its vast and empty beaches, the North Norfolk Coast is a place to lose yourself, a place of non-attachment. Whenever I get there and immerse myself in the landscape, I have a sense of lightness, like a weight being lifted.

My wife and I first discovered the North Norfolk Coast on a blisteringly hot weekend in 1992. It came recommended by a friend who'd just returned from Blakeney, and it was appealingly convenient for East London, where we lived at the time, being just a couple of hours up the M11.

Our first stop was Cromer, then we moved on to Blakeney (still a favourite) and finished up at Wells. We were hooked, and as the years went by kept coming back for long weekends, sometimes in the spring and summer but occasionally out of season too, and by doing so discovered that we almost loved it more when the geese had arrived and the tourists gone.

We were often fantasising about having a little bolthole up there, and when things took off with my music there was really nowhere else that we seriously considered.

We have been coming here now for almost 25 years now but find that we love the place more and more as the years go by. It is somewhere that has come to feel like a second home and where we can leave the pressures of London life behind.

As anyone knows who has spent any time there, the North Norfolk Coast is an incredible place for experiencing wildlife. The long stretch of coast from Snettisham to Cley is something of a birdwatching mecca. I love the love the whole coastline but since we bought our house near Holme, the Holme Dunes reserve has very much become my local patch. Obviously I'm a little biased, but I think that Holme Dunes is one of the most beautiful and rewarding sections of the entire coastline. It is also for some reason, one of the least discovered.

I am a hugely enthusiastic though not very expert birdwatcher. When I was a child growing up in Manchester I would pore endlessly over bird and nature books. Then when my parents relocated to Solva, west Wales my connection with nature deepened further as I came face to face with adders, grass snakes, gannets, kestrels, buzzards, seals and a whole host of other creatures. It wasn't until I bought a place in north Norfolk though that my passion for watching birds really took hold.

A few days after we bought our first cottage in Stiffkey, I opened the bedroom curtains to discover that I was face-to-face with an absolutely stunning male sparrowhawk who was sitting on the kitchen roof just a matter of feet away. I drank in the detail of all his beautiful orange barring before he turned to glare at me with blazing eyes. I felt the quickening of my childhood birdwatchers pulse. A few days later I went out and bought myself a pair of second-hand binoculars.

The binoculars were a game changer. Something simple but profound had happened, and my birdwatching universe had been transformed. I've never looked back. It's simply amazing to be able to peer into another creature's world even for just a few fleeting minutes, and for those brief suspended moments, feel everything else just simply disappear.