AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Kirk Point is a low, windswept headland on Corio Bay's northern shoreline at Point Wilson, about 60 km from Melbourne and 25 km from Geelong. Mapped as a historic and protected site, it is best known not for buildings but for a quiet stretch of coast: a small cove of calm, clear water, shell-strewn beaches, and wide mud-and-sand flats that glow at sunset. It is an unhurried, somewhat remote spot that rewards a visit at dusk or for a cast of a line.↗↗
What makes it appealing is the sense of isolation. Part of the Port Phillip Bay (Western Shoreline) and Bellarine Peninsula Ramsar wetland, the coast here stays low and natural, ringed by salt marsh, basalt outcrops and shelly ridges, with little of the bustle of a developed seaside town. Visitors come to beachcomb, watch the water birds, fish off the rocks, and stay for the sunset over the land and the moonrise out over the bay.↗↗
A quiet point on Corio Bay
Between the mouth of the Little River and Kirk Point, the coast runs for about five kilometres as four low, sandy beaches separated by rocky heads, and Kirk Point itself is one of the most prominent of these basalt-and-shell headlands. The beaches here are narrow and fronted by broad intertidal flats, the kind of shoreline that changes dramatically with the tide. The water in the cove just beyond the point is repeatedly described as calm and clear, an unexpected pocket of shelter on this open bay coast.
