If you park your car at the Church in Flatrock and wander north-east along the main road, you’ll soon come to a small road off to your right called “Hickey’s Lane”.

 Turning right along Hickey’s Lane and heading downhill will drop you neatly onto the East Coast Trail, heading north.

You can walk this trail all the way to Cape St. Francis (and beyond, to Bauline, if you care to venture the cut-but-not-yet-upgraded trail).

Or you can walk for about five minutes, wending your way riverward and stopping at Big River to explore the rocks.

(Should you decide to continue the walk, there’s a lovely new bridge just upstream to help you across the torrent.)

As you can see, we stopped at the river. Our chief distraction were the whales, but the river itself proved worthy of poking and rock-hopping and playing around. It was quite chilly, though, so our trip was curtailed a little more than we had hoped. We’ll head back again soon, this time with a tripod.

Taking long exposure photos without one requires succumbing to the whims of geology; you are stuck with using whatever natural outcrop happens to be available to brace your camera upon and cannot always compose the shots to their best advantage.