Wednesday 10 August, 2011 - Butley to Felixstowe Ferry

Like my Norfolk walk last year, I have saved the longest leg for the last day. I reckon it’s about 15 miles, though it’s a bit difficult to properly calculate the distance, as the path is rather winding. On my mobile phone I have booked a cheap ticket from Ipswich to London that leaves at 8 pm, which is giving me perhaps far too much time to get there, but I had been worried by bad weather forecasts when booking, and had wanted to leave myself time if rain slows me down, but now the forecasts look increasingly likely to be inaccurate, the weather fine.

In any case I am content to get up at 5 am to enable me to be up and walking not long after dawn. I have had a better night’s sleep than the night before for sure, but sleep is always fitful in the tight space that is my tent, and I am glad enough to be up and out of it for the last time. A proper bed tonight is a pleasant prospect. To lighten my load for the day, I jettison everything I can, including my old threadbare blue cords which goes in the village hall kitchen bin.

Tea and porridge consumed, I leave a thank you note to Di and the people of Butley on the Village Hall kitchen counter, and I’m on the road at 6 pm, up past the pub and through a small estate of modern-ish houses that make Butley a rather larger village than I had so far realised. I need to walk along the road and turn left down a footpath which will take me onto the Suffolk Coast Path at Butley Abbey. I see the church of Butley Abbey ahead. On my right circular hay bales are spread across a field of stubble. I have watched these hay bales being made elsewhere; a hay baler pulled by a tractor scoops up all the stalks that lie in neat lines in a hoovering action, rolling the hay up in the round chamber of the baler. When full the chamber raises up slightly and dumps its perfectly formed circular hay bale out of the back with a plop. Then its off again to repeat this satisfyingly scatalogical process until the entire field is done.

Hay bales

Finding the left turn by the church I march across soft sandy soil. I am heartened by the good weather and looking forward to the walk ahead. Contentedly, I crack a fart; much louder than I had expected it to be, it sends several pigeons scattering in different directions. The path joins a B road where a black cat crosses my path. I go past some houses, sheds, tractors and farming machinery. Back on the path alongside a field, my eye is caught by the unaccountable moving of branches in a hedgerow on the next side of the field. I glance away but when I look again, two fallow deer, a buck with fine antlers and either a doe or a fawn, have appeared in the same spot and are both standing with fixed stares in my direction. After a moment they turn and take off away from me running along the edge of the field. Reaching the far side, they stop and watch me again at a safe distance, giving me an opportunity to photograh them before they disappear into the trees in the direction of Rendlesham Forest.

Deer near Reldlesham Forest

I had been reading about Rendlesham Forest in the pub last night. The East Anglian Daily Times reported that a senior US airman has dismissed the famous UFO incident at Rendlesham Forest as a hoax, and these recently published comments have in turn been dismissed as “a load of rubbish” by a leading "local expert" on the sightings (UFO expert disputes colonel's hoax claim - 09/08/11). This is the latest instalment of "news" on the Rendlesham Forest Incident, which took place over two days in 1980 when US servicemen reported close encounters with extraterrestrial visitors. The local expert is Brenda Butler, who is unshaken in her belief that the forest was, and continues to be, visited by space travellers. Elsewhere in the paper, I read of plans for a skate park to appease the bad, bored boys of Kessingland who had baited me as I passed through their town last week, and in another item,  I learn about the construction of the Great Gabbard Wind Farm I had seen on the way to Aldeburgh. Lastly, I read with some amazement about the riots in London, now spreading across the country.

I go along a wide sandy path that comes to and continues straight over a grassy ridge called Burrow Hill, and on the top of Burrow Hill you can see Butley River (yes, that’s what it’s called on the map, NOT the River Butley)and a ferry crossing point. I wonder how often the ferry is used, there is no-one about at this early hour. The river stretches off into the distance, where at some point out of sight it joins the River Ore alongside the diminishing shingle spit of Orford Ness again. Taking a wrong course through brambles and thick grass, I eventually reach and walk along the beautiful Butley, just me in the landscape under the sun,at 6.45 in the morning.

Butley River

But I am not really alone, for at this early hour I am rewarded with sightings of birds and animals, and my walking progress is happily arrested as I stop to watch them all. A lone cormorant sits by the riverside. A heron rises from some reeds and appears to be following a jackdaw, then swerves off to stand near another heron by a pool. Watching the two, I see movement by a hedge and gate behind them, and I’m pretty sure it’s a hare, not a rabbit, with its more upright gait, longer legs and livelier presence. Two finches with rust brown wings and grey faces sit on top of a berry bush, linnets maybe. Sparrows flutter and play along by the path. I see several graceful white little egret (quite common birds these days) wading the mud and then rising into flight; avocet too. I am really ticking them off in the book this morning! You can understand why birdwatching can ensnare the obsessive compulsive. But it is the variety of life and the beauty of the setting which makes this morning special, rather than any supposed rarity in the creatures I‘m seeing. My progress is slow as I stop and stop again to look and listen. Two swans fly ahead and above my path in towards a broad inland, making their strange stereo honking sound. Their wings have to work hard to support and propel their bulbous bodies, like bloated yards of ale, through the air, their long necks straining forward, creatures improbably built for flight, but not without nobility and a kind of grace. Where a farmers tractor rakes over a ploughed field, seagulls flock and scream behind it to feast on the food titbits it uncovers. In the middle of the field, two hares run through the stubble to escape the noisy scene. I watch them until I can see them no more.

Salt marshes by Butley River

It is a couple of miles before you come out to the mouth of the River Ore, where the shingle shelf or Orford Ness’s southmost point dwindles to nothing. Before that, just inland, you can see the high and long wire topped fences that surround the Hollesley Bay HM Young Offenders Institution. Beyond the fences are brick built buildings that hold the prisoners. A tall chimney rises from inside the grounds; it seems every hospital and prison has one. Nearby but not in sight there is also a Youth Custody Centre for younger offenders. The positioning of a prisons within this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty has a sad poignancy. In a setting where life and landscape finds its liberty and expression, invisible inmates are constrained in mute confinement and in varying degrees and varieties of misery. What dynamic exists between what‘s outside the prison walls and in? I wonder if the prisoners at this institution are ever given licence to go outside the walls to visit the pleasant spaces that surround them? 

Past Hollesley the path cuts inland at a sluice and follows alongside a waterway going towards the dairy farm on Oxley Marshes.Coming out to a minor b-road, I choose to cheat the longer path and take the more direct route to the small hamlet of Shingle Street ahead. It’s 9 am and I haven’t stopped to rest for a good while. Though served by a the small road, the white terrace of houses give the appearance of being on a street of shingle on the beach, as the place name suggests. I let my rucksack down on the pebbles and mould a seat in the stones with my backside, to rest up for a while, watching the slow, distant procession along the sea’s horizon of ferries and ships coming into Felixstowe and Harwich.  

Shingle Street

Along the coast, the high metal crane constructions at the port of Felixstowe are now a great deal closer than they appeared when I first saw them this morning coming over Burrow Hill. There is a four to five mile stretch of flat and fairly straight coastline between here and the Felixstowe Ferry. Nearby is the first of four Martello Towers between here and there. After struggling to walk across a stretch of pebble beach with my heavy load on my back, a proper path emerges next to the first Martello Tower, which has been converted into a fashionable looking, though rather windowless, residence. Further down the path, an information board tells me a bit about the towers. There were over 100 of them built along the coast between Suffolk and Sussex at the time of the Napoleonic Wars around 1800. Each was a fortified gun tower, with walls three metres thick so that no cannon ball could penetrate it. Each would have a commanding officer and 30 men guarding it. I imagine how dull it must have been, to be a private officer stuck garrissoned at one of these towers, waiting month after month for the French invaders to arrive, eventually never coming. There must have been many soldiers who wished for Bonaparte’s armies to show themselves, to give them a fight, and to relieve the tedium. At the same time, there were no doubt many who wished nothing of the sort! Never having had much taste or flair for fighting, I presume I would have been one for the latter category, had destiny landed me in that uncomforable place and time.

Martello Tower

The coast here is littered too with concrete cubes and other obstacles put here to help hinder an enemy land invasion during the two great wars. There are stories, retold by Sebald, that Shingle Street was the location of an abortive invasion attempt by the Germans in 1940, and that bizarre weapons experiments by the allies in this evacuated area led to the hideous deaths of British servicemen. Each martello tower is about a mile apart. The next one is just a ruin. The next inhabited. The path goes straight along a sea wall. The weather is still fine, a little blowy though, and I’m wearying at 10 am. Four rectangular man made lakes appear inland. The birds fly in and out. The path turns in towards the village of Bawdsey, and I go past another strange building of military purpose. Three storeys of bald reinforced concrete, it has an observation gallery at  the top with a metal grill with the words “PRISONER OF WAR” made in wrought iron - some kind of prisoners' gaol? Another construction that presumably (and happily) never served its intended purpose. 

Prisoner building

Going inland now towards the village I am puzzled for a moment by a field of pristine lawn to my left, like a huge golfing green with neither flag nor hole, serviced by sprinklers. It’s a turf farm; the grass that’s replaced from time to time in sports stadia and the like must come from somewhere - sometimes from here. On the other side of the path in a similar field rolls of turf are piled neatly on pallets among tractors and machinery which stand on the bald earth from where the turf has been recently scalped. My mind idles on the question of how many times a lawn can be grown and shorn before too much topsoil is removed to continue…

I go past a pretty village school, and pretty houses with (more) long lawns in front of them. The map tells me again that the path along the road to Felixstowe Ferry is straighter and more direct than going back onto the coast path, but I don’t want to cheat that much, especially on what is the final leg of the Suffolk Coast Path, which formally ends at Felixstowe Ferry. A coastal path continues here, going to and beyond the town of Felixstowe proper, but it is the Stour and Orwell walk, not the Suffolk Coast Path.

Anyway, I take the path back down towards the beach, and indeed, that’s all there is, a beach - there is no path to be had from here on; the path and beach are one. Fortunately the tide is far out enough to allow me to walk on the firmer, flatter sand on the shore, rather than having to walk on the shingle, which would be tortuous.

I walk on along the beach in rising anticipation of getting to the ferry, but the walk is long and into the wind, frustrating my progress. Old wooden groynes litter the way along the beach. I hope to find a path that will take me up the cliff and along the top, but if there ever was such a path, it has long gone into the sea. As on my sea walk to Southwold, trees ready to fall overhang the cliff tops above. Above the cliff, for most of the way, can be seen the long wire fence hung from concrete posts that marks the extensive  grounds of Bawdsey Manor, where WW2 radar operations were moved by Robert Watson-Watt in the 1930s after earlier testing in Orford Ness.

Approaching Felixstowe Ferry

Eventually I come to directions to a raised path above the beach, where warning signs about decaying groynes warn walkers away from the shore. The raised path on offer is a little hazardous however, at least for a weary walker with a heavy backpack, because it consists of a narrow shingle covered path held in by metal barriers, with cliffs on the land side and a sheer unfenced 20 foot drop to on the other. With concentration I keep to the right side of the path, fearful of a false step that will send me over the side, until the “path” gradually levels with the beach ahead. With the red brick towers of Bawdsey Manor itself now peeping above the trees along the cliffs, I know I am near the mouth of the River Deben and Felixstowe Ferry. A stone in my right boot persuades me to stop, take my boots off, and have a long rest on the pebbles. It’s midday and I’m near Felixstowe Ferry, with a ticket that leaves Ipswich at 8 (yes 8!) in the evening, there is no reason under the sun to make haste. I’m comfortable - the pebbles form a me shaped chair underneath me. I could almost sleep, but I’m a little too full of anticipation at reaching the end to quite do that.

Boots back on, I trudge round the corner where the River Deben opens to the sea. About 1400 years ago, the Angles brought the ship of their King along this river to its burial place at inland at Sutton Hoo. Today I find a fat family eating a picnic in the curve of the pebbles overlooking the river mouth. I ask them if the ferry is running today. They think it is. The ferry, a little motor boat, is indeed doing a brisk enough trade. Kids and families at both sides dangle bait on lines for crabs to grab. You’d think the creatures would learn to go elsewhere. Perhaps not. The ferryman has impressively leathery tanned skin. He asks me if I want a single or return fare. It’s a single, and on the other side of the Deben Estuary my Suffolk Coast Path walk is done.

My day, however, is far from over, but I will spare you a full account of my anticlimactic travails through increasingly hot weather to get to Felixstowe Station and then Ipswich, where I wearily remain far longer than I want to, on account of my 8pm train ticket. It has been a successful, rewarding, if not always happy trip. I haven't been at my cheeriest, and the lonely and sometimes melancholic landscapes I've passed through haven't always lightened my load, but I'm happy now to have made the journey.

Tuesday 9 August, 2011 - Orford

A miserable night in the tent; with nobody else camping in the field, and nobody (seemingly) about, I'm troubled by my isolation and my dreams transport me to an East London nightmare underworld inhabited by every absurd and outlandish phantom of the undead. In waking moments between dreams of zombies and banshees,  I make in my mind muddled plans to abandon my walk in the morning, the thought of staying here another night is so intolerable. These plans are in equal measure confused and detailed, involving travel routes, train tickets, ordering online, maps, and the prospect (real enough, according to the weather forecasts I follow on my mobile when I can) of bad weather approaching.

But this morning, now sitting eating porridge in the sun on a bench by the recreation ground by the village hall, my outlook is entirely transformed. All thoughts of abandoning the walk are dissolved, and I am positive about continuing, hopefully to the end of the Suffolk Coast Path at Felixstowe Ferry.

I am going to Orford today - Di comes by and I ask the best way, and she says it’s an hour and a half walk, down the little road to Chillesford that I chose not to go down when getting here yesterday, and then on via footpaths that turn off to the right past the pub. The little single track road (also a designated cycle route) is so much nicer than the main road. In 45 minutes only one car comes either way. On my left as I walk along are hedges, the odd house and little fields of pasture and a few horses.On the right, towards the sea, fields of waving yellow barley curve across gentle hillsides, with white/grey clouds above floating across a blue canvas. With no heavy pack to carry with me today (most things left with my tent in Butley) I can walk with a spring in my step.  I pass some elderberries growing in the hedge, and I’m reminded that my planned “Operation Elderberry” is to begin in earnest when I return to london. Last year I had my first bash at making elderberry wine with perfectly drinkable results, so this year, with all the equipment and a reasonable modicum of experience I plan to harvest a freezer full of elderberries (which grow in fair abundance in various overgrown spots near me in Stratford and Leyton) to keep a small production line of country wine going into the middle of 2012.

Barley in Butley

The road passes by Butley sluice on the right, and Butley Mills on the left, a building of similar character to those seen yesterday at the Snape Maltings, but smaller, which is now a self catering holiday centre with communal facilities. After the pub at Chillesford, I find the right hand path that goes towards Orford. It’s a very pleasant walk through pasture and arable fields (barley, potatoes), ferns and woody cut throughs. At one point the path goes right across the middle of a recently ploughed and harvested potato field. The V- shaped trenches, more than a foot deep, are neat and sharply defined. I bend down and run the soil through my fingers; it is remarkably sandy - a little yellower and you could put it in the corner of your garden and pass it off as a sandpit for children to play in. It is amazing (to me) that such sandysoil can support the variety of crops that grow here, but I know it to be highly fertile. In with the soil are pieces of cockle and other shells, indicating the earth’s briny history. 

Sandy Soil, nr Orford

Further on there is a grand house, surrounded by extensive lawns, a grand drive lined with trees with those circular wooden fences round them to stop deer damage. What was once a grand single residence is now divided into apartments. Thus property developers maximise the value of large properties these days, which otherwise become millstones for all but the super- super rich. I sit for a while on a bench on the edge of a cricket field within the grounds - a fine wooden pavilion overlooks it, raised up on a grassy bank. Approaching Orford- the castle and church coming into view, I pick cherries and plums from the trees along the path.

Di’s prediction that the walk from Butley is 1 ½ hours long is proven accurate as I walk into the small town of Orford at 12.30 in the afternoon. I pass by attractive terraces of cottages, many lovingly maintained gardens, with fine hollyhocks particularly impressive. It’s a lovely day and the place is quite busy with visitors. At the smart “village store” cum café, I buy a bit of food to take with me to the quay, going past smart gift shops and antiques emporia, restaurants and a tea room, and a couple of attractive Adnams pubs.

Across  a narrow expanse of water from Orford Quay is Orford Ness, ten miles and 2,250 acres of vegetated shingle spit, a rare, remote and slowly shifting terrain consisting of tidal rivers, mud flats, sand flats, and lagoons, grassland, salt marsh and, of course, good old shingle. Almost an island, it is connected to the mainland by a thin strip of land at Slaughden, just south of Aldeburgh. From here it extends south for ten miles, gradually widening, and separated from the mainland by the tidal stretch of the River Alde, which, nearer Orford, changes its name for some reason to the River Ore. In addition to its singular status as a rare and fragile habitat supporting scarce communities of plants, birds and insects, Orford Ness is a former Minstry of Defence testing site, and a number of large, strange concrete buildings remain standing there, relics of a base for the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment that was built in the 50s. Before all this, in the years before WW11, Orford Ness was the site where Robert Watson-Watt completed the first successful experiments in the Radar defences system that saved the nation’s bacon during the Battle of Britain.

Access to and ownership of the the island is now in the hands of the National Trust. The somewhat unreliable map I had purchased in Sizewell tells me that visits to the Ness are by prior arrangement only. This proves not to be true; there is a National Trust office on the quay, and they lay on a small ferry boat service every 20 minutes between 10 am and 2 pm, places bookable on the day, which means that up to 150 people can visit Orford Ness daily. I get to the quay, still in fine weather, the Ore stretching out in both directions, sailboats drifting by, sea birds swirling round, the Orford Ness lighthouse and weapons testing buildings hazily visible, and beyond them, the sea. It is a lovely scene, but one that is not appreciated by a very disgruntled couple, who are remonstrating with a lady from the National Trust who has just explained to them that there are no more places on the ferry to the island today. “We’ve driven two hours to get here” complains the man with some bitterness. Sod off then, I think; it’s such a beautiful, fascinating spot, even if you can’t get a boat across. How blinkered people can be.

Though I would have taken the £7.50 trip across if I could, I am not enormously disappointed that I can’t. Sebald’s account of his visit to this “extraterrestrial” space, describes a fearful place, abandoned and forgotten, the weird shaped concrete bunkers and pagoda like “the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe”. 30 years later, I suspect that the island’s dreadful atmosphere might be diminished somewhat as 150 sightseers traipse around it daily. Thanks to the place's strange story being recounted programmes like Coast on TV, and the abundance of information about everything on the internet generally, Orford Ness is less forgotten than it once was, and is a key stopping point for anyone exploring the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area Of Natural Beauty. I chat to the National Trust lady, who is upset by her recent confrontation; she lacks the people skills and thick skin required to shrug off the complaints of daytrippers deprived of their right to travel across and view the pagodas up close. She says she wishes more people could go, but “they” (the NT managers presumably) don’t want it. I’d be content if they allowed fewer, and I’m happy to walk along the mainland path going south along the Ore, and gaze across instead.

The path goes along a sea wall, inland are low lying fields and marshes, and the town rising on a hill beyond, with the Norman keep of Orford Castle towering above, Union Jack fluttering briskly. On my left as I walk out along the path the grey concrete barrows and pagodas come into closer view, across the widening expanse of the River Ore, as it comes out to the sea. I stop on the corner at a place marked on my map as Chantry Point where the sea wall path turns away to the right (south, roughly) and away from the buildings on Orford Ness. From the muddy edges of the shore below, I pick a few handfuls of samphire to eat tonight, then I settle on the grass for a while, and with the help of my binoculars examine the concrete buildings in detail and make clumsy scetches of them in my notebook, in an attempt to better perceive and grasp their various structures. Some are quite low lying; one is a concrete trapezium with a single dark rectangular entrance. Does this lead to some huge underground laboratory? Indeed do all the structures sit above unseen levels underground? In front of one of the pagodas stands a single story building which resembles a late 50s school classroom, with it’s brick construction, low rectangular shape and metal window frames along the entire long side.  Over time, the movement of the sun in the sky and the presence and absence of cloud reveals each structure in subtle variations of light and shadow, showing different aspects and shapes. I try to take photographs as they move between sillhouette to sharp bright detail. My zoom lens isn’t powerful enough to take very good pictures, but some pictures are steady enough to capture them in hazy detail. The distance perhaps preserving some of the mystery of these monuments to cold war boffinry.

Orford Ness

A tourist boat trip comes by; “on the left you will see two buildings with raised roofs. These buildings are called Pagodas…” announces the knowledgeable tour guide over the boat’s loudspeaker, “no nuclear material… was used…” he goes on, more and more inaudibly. I look down and see my legs, camera, bag, crawling with red and black spotted ladybirds. A tern with long orange beak flies by, and with my binoculars I catch it in my sights as it swoops and dives for fish before flying off down towards the quay. For a moment I get up to walk on, but I find myself unable to turn my back on this enchanting spot, with the view across to the island so vivid and clear now in the sun, and I sit back down among the ladybirds and stay longer and longer.  

Orford Ness

I wonder about the weapons testing buildings; who had been the last scientists to leave this place? Who had been the last to look back for the last time, never to return? Did they look back and think that what they had been doing was worthwhile? Had it been a job well done? Had they achieved something? Had they destroyed something?

My orange beaked tern comes back. I train my binoculars on him and he hovers above the water in the spot he had been before, wings flapping gracefully, eyes and beak arched downwards in its concentrated search for the glisten of fish on the surface of the water. It  hovers... hovers... starts to dive, then stops before reaching the water. It hovers again, dives again, stops its dive, hovers, hovers longer, then dives down, “plosh”, into the water, but comes up with no fish. Another tern with different colouring, a young one I think, joins the sport for a while. They fly off, but return again several times to fish the stretch, repeating their spectacular performance for me, hovering, plunging down, diving, and up again… oblivious to the bunkers and pagodas beyond, to them probably empty and meaningless shapes, if not invisible.

Orford Ness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyHWB5rvCoA

Monday 8 August, 2011 - Sizewell to Butley

I’m keen to move on from my Sunday doldrums around Sizewell and strike forth and start early for Butley. I’m going back a way along the Sandlings Walk that I came in on last night. The Sandlings walk is a longer and more meandering path than the Suffolk Coast Path, running nearby somewhat parallel to it, which takes in Southwold, Woodbridge and the countryside to the east of Ipswich. The morning is sunny but fresh and cool; weather as good as you could wish for when walking.

Past spooky Sizewell Hall for the last time, I am on my way at 7 in the morning. I pass through the Aldringham Walks conservation area. “Managed by the RSPB, it is an outstanding area of Suffolk Sandlings. The heathland, woodland and scrub are vital for ground nesting birds such as nightjars, woodlarks and skylarks. The open heathland  also supports…stonechats, Dartford warblers and yellowhammers.”

My early start and the fine weather invigorates me. My mission to make it to Butley inspires new purpose to my trip, but I mean to take my time, and take fairly frequent stops, which is essential anyway, with my heavy pack. At a place called North Warren on the map I stop at a bench in front of a wooden fence, beyond which are thick ferns and a flat expanse marked as The Fens on the Ordnance Survey, a line of trees in the distance. I sit for ten or so peaceful minutes watching the sunlit tops of vegetation for bird action. I don’t see much, but I’m content. It’s Monday morning; a jogger goes by,  a walker and his dog too, perhaps out before going to work.

Rabbits are busy on the heath; I see a dozen at a glance outside a  warren that weaves through a little mound over to my right. When I was a kid in the sixties it was something of an event to see a rabbit. Now they are extremely numerous - fun to see, but commonplace. We should eat more of them, I think to myself. I am back on the railway track path I was on yesterday. The Sandlings Walk has gone west inland, and I successfully identify where the old railway meets the Suffolk Coast Path that has also turned inland after Thorpeness.

From here I should keep going west, missing Aldeburgh and heading for the village of Snape. Things go a bit wrong when I try to follow the path across a golf course. On this Monday morning, there are no golfers in sight, and I walk across a fairway, with great care, as a sign directs me, to a stile on the other side. Here I find three “Public Footpath” signs, pointing in different directions, but none is for the Suffolk Coast Path. I take a wrong right left turn to a road which starts taking me in the wrong direction. This detour, going through the outskirts of Aldeburgh, through some 60s municipal housing estates,adds a good hour to my journey. With their biggish front gardens the houses are quite nice. Many though are spoiled in their appearance by those horrible white plastic doors (UPVC I think they are called), that are blighting the appearance of houses and streets up and down the country.

I turn right at a roundabout onto the A1094 and it’s a hike in the hot sunshine up a steady hill. On the right the fairways of the golf course go on and on. How come there was no blue marker to guide me on the right route through the golf course on the other side of that fairway? I write “blame golfers!” along the top of the current page in my notebook.

The left turn I’m looking for is marked as the Sailor’s Path on my other map, which should take me through Hazlewood Common and Black Heath Wood to Snape. Just when I begin to doubt I’m going to find it, there it is, and I stop for a satisfied rest by the roadside on a grassy verge, and eat some of the food I bought in Aldeburgh yesterday.  At half past nine I am nearly halfway to Butley, or at least, so I calculate, and the weather is as near perfect as it can be - sunny but gently so. A little way along the path as I get on my way again, I come by a small group of walkers and we stop to congratulate the day for a moment. On the left and right are fields of mauve wild flowers; none of us know what they are - not heather. The path is lined with ferns and blackberry bushes; this time with many ripe fruit, which I stop to pick occasionally. You know the nicest thing is ripe blackberries served with good white vanilla ice cream; try it!

The Sailor's Path, Hazelwood Marshes

Black Heath Wood, on the Sailor's Path

 Gradually trees crowd in on the ferny blackberry hedge, and then passing through woodland I come out across wet marshy grassland via a wooden path. The grass is peppered with pretty yellow primroses. Under more trees I cross a wooden bridge over clear pool or brook, where I watch sticklebacks dart about between the lilypads. Alongside the wood now, and the field on the right is a blanket of primroses. The walk is a lovely alternation of woodland, open meadows and marshy heath. Back in the wood, the living green trees struggle for light and space as they tangle with the twisted old dead limbs. Among taller trees further on, I stop to photograph toadstools and fungus on the forest floor, and then point upwards to capture the patches of blue sky and the criss-crossing sunbeams coming through the canopy. Any wood or forest is a beautiful place when illuminated from above by the sunshine, but Black Heath Wood, with it’s variety of deciduous and evergreen, tall and not so tall, living and dead, and in it’s marshy setting, is a particularly delightful place to spend a morning.

Black Heath Wood

Coming out of the wood, the path widens big enough for tractors and at New England Farm joins the road into Snape. Smart houses line the road, and I go past a couple of rather appealing looking pubs which at this stage in the day (still morning) are not yet open. At the village green I take directions up the hill towards a the village shop. Two elderly but lively ladies wave to each other across the road ahead of me and as I pass by I overhear them enthusing about someone’s performance the night before. They’ve probably been to see a concert at The Maltings which is down the hill at the edge of the village, a classical concert venue that’s an extension of the area’s Benjamin Britten legacy. After visiting the store, I stop to eat a lunch on the village green, moving as necessary to make way for the local gardener mowing the grass.

I explore the Maltings for a bit, located by sluice, before the wide expanse of the Long Reach of the Alde. Something of a tourist centre, a destination for classical music fans predominantly, which in addition to the concert venue has gift shops, cafes, information centre, AND a residential sales office, where the new residences converted from their original purpose of malting local barley and brewing beer are on sale. Incongruously positioned in front of these aspirational residences, the shell of a burnt out Ford transit sits in the forecourt.

I cross the bridge by the sluice and turn left along the path that goes along the River Alde’s Long Reach. The fine weather has given way to blusteriness and occasional drizzle, and despite my luncheon on the green I begin to flag badly - I have been walking for 5 hours and the burden of my pack, which must be the weight of a nine or ten year old child, is taking its toll. Wearying of the straps pulling on my shoulders, after not having gone so very far since the last stop, I turn in towards the reach at a suggested picnic spot. Resting my pack on a mound of long grass, I walk through increasingly yielding muddy ground to the shore of the reach, with the water of the Alde shimmering to my left. Only then do I realise that the shining expanse beyond is not the surface of the water, but of mud; smooth, wet almost mirror-like mud. Sixty years ago the Long Reach was all drained farmland, but the land was lost to the great flood of 1953. Two studry posts standing in the mud a little in front of me may well be gate posts; one is thicker than the other, which has two indentations cut into it where gate hinges would have been. Viewing the landscape later from above on a hillside, I can see the outline of fields where former hedgerows rise a few feet above the sheets of mud, the old church rising on a low hill just beyond, as if on an island. 

Gate posts on the Alde

From here the path goes south through open farmland towards Tunstall Forest. To get there I go along a B road for a way, sampling a variety of plums from trees along the way next  to some potato fields. Up ahead is a pig farm, and a blue marker tells me that my path goes straight through it. The weather has gone back to being sunny and warm, and I walk down the hill with a big field of arched roof pig stys on my right, like little nissen huts. In the afternoon sun the pigs, true to stereotype, wallow in the mud wherever the stuff can be found. Some gaze indifferently in my direction, as if in opium trances. The ill marked path leads me down past farm buildings and caravans, where quails skuttle round nervously, then up an incline where soft sandy ground underfoot slows my progress.I see no-one about, it is just me the pigs and the quails. Piglets too, suckling at their big, big mothers’ breasts in the sunshine.  I turn right by a wood, more pigs on my left, the path levels out. I scare a few grouse who flutter noisily away; slow in take off, you can see why they are a popular shooting target. At the end of the field there is an unmarked stile and a road. I stop, ease off my pack, and allow my shoulders to enjoy some unburdened freedom for a time.

On the other side of the road is Tunstall Forest. Forestry commission signs mark an entry in, but I’m mistaken in thinking it’s the route I want, and get rather lost. I walk back to the road to try to find the correct signposted path. At a little car park and entry to the forest further down, a group of people stand waiting for their guide, who has not arrived. They can’t help me. After some slow and tentative exploration, I eventually come across a blue marker. It’s a bit tedious, I know, being lost, but one small compensation occurs to me, which is that while you are lost, you forgot about being tired; your attention is directed away from an aching back and shoulders, towards finding a solution to a more pressing difficulty. Once back on track, and striding through the pleasant sunlit forest, I find myself wearied again, and stop in a small clearing on the grass. Lying down, I become aware of the walking party I left at the car park, coming my way, and coming past me. “You haven’t got very far” says one to me. Mutely, I wave them all a weary wave, and smile them an ever so slightly sarcastic smile. Bon voyage banditos. 

Tunstall Forest

Unlike the variety of trees and other flora at Black Heath Wood this morning, Tunstall Forest is a commercial evergreen forest run by the Forestry Commission. The trees are planted mainly in straight lines, with space in between for logging equipment to move between them and remove the tall straight timber. Nearer the next village of Chillesford though there are wilder, prettier bits. Coming out the other side, I come to some pretty rural cottages. At a small road again there are poor markings, but eventually I find myself by the one village pub, a rather uninspiring looking pub restaurant that’s not yet open, and I get my bearings.

There are two roads that go to Butley which is the next village just over a mile away. Unwisely I take the main road, and I struggle at some points to avoid the oncoming cars, which are surprisingly numerous

It’s a quarter to four when I finally get to the “Butley - please drive carefully” sign. Six hours since I told myself that I was halfway here when I’d got to the Sailor’s Path. Either I’ve slowed considerably or my map reading is way off - maybe a bit of both. My campsite, which I’ve been tipped off about by a friend,  is the field next to Butley Village Hall, where campers can stay for a trifling sum by prior arrangement. There is an email address and a phone number on the internet, just type Butley Village Hall into Google and it comes up. A lady called Di looks after it, and I had phoned her from Sizewell two days before, to check it was OK to stay, not sure at that point if I was arriving on Sunday or Monday, and she had told me to just turn up and pitch up and she’d “come and find me”.

I pitch my tent, stuff most of my things away inside, and make for the pub. Finding it closed, I come back, and a diminutive woman comes striding across from the end of the field where there’s a large farmhouse and farm buildings, her Scotch Terrier running eagerly ahead to meet me. “I’m going to have to charge you to camp here, you know” she announces. I introduce myself as the person who rang two days before, friend of Liz’s sister. “Oh!” she says, “Normally it’s £4.50 a night but as you’ve such a small tent it will be £3”. Not having the right change, she receives my fiver with a promise to give me my at the next opportunity. “I can unlock the hall for you, if you like, so that you can use the toilets and the kitchen”, she offers. Not seeing any disadvantage in this, I thank her and say that that would be great. She goes off to collect the keys from a lady who lives across the way. Coming back, she unlocks the hall and shows me round, all neat and smart, with a parquet floored main hall, kitchen, mens, ladies and disabled toilet. I’m not sure if she’s just letting me in while she’s there,  or leaving me the keys, or what?  “Usually it’s the Mothers and Toddlers Group on Tuesday mornings, but they won’t bother you - they’re of for the summer. “ Then she’s off, leaving me the hall unlocked for the night.

At 6 I am in Butley’s Oyster Inn, it’s Monday night and it’s empty but for a few farm workers. Farm workers in a modern sense - not horny handed sons of the soil, but a couple of students, one from Brighton, one a Kiwi, on some sort of work placement, and one a young farm manager, somewhat to the manor born, I’d say, accompanied by an older man who’s been ringing (a birdwatching term I think) birds of prey, for whom he buys drinks.

Leaving my notes at my table to get another pint of Adnams at the bar, I’m slightly (and unreasonably, my twitcher friends!) narked that the young buck assumes me to be a birdwatcher. I explain I’m on a walk and though interested in birds I might not know the difference between a hen harrier and a pigeon at a distance. Our young buck takes this as his cue to recount the following funny story.

‘A gamekeeper thinks he sees a game bird but shoots a hen harrier instead. To hide the evidence of his crime of shooting a protected species, he decides to eat it. Not all the evidence is consumed however, and feathers found round his bin lead him to his arrest and he is hauled before the magistrate. The gamekeeper admits his crime, but pleads mitigation, saying that pressure of work and fear of losing his employment made him do it etc etc. The magistrate is sympathetic, and lets him off fairly lightly. Before the case is dismissed, however, the magistrate says, “tell me, before you go, for I admit to being curious, what did the hen harrier taste like?”. To which the gamekeeper replied, “why somewhat between a golden eagle and an osprey, m’lud”’.

OK, not exactly word for word as it was told, but the gist, the gist.

Sunday 7 August, 2011 - Sizewell to Aldeburgh and back

At 2.45 am I am woken up by a child crying bitterly, in spite of the soft sing song pleadings of both parents. “I don’t want that one I want my one!” wails the ungrateful infant, not at all appreciating one of the basic principle of camping, that we leave behind home comforts for portable makeshifts that are not as good. Later I’m woken by the sound of quick-fire knocking, like a wooden mechanical drummer toy, or a toy machine gun, or, indeed, a woodpecker. Sleep in my one man tent shelter is always fitful anyway, so these sleep interruptions don’t annoy me especially. It must be getting light outside, but it is hard to tell, because a campsite lamp is on all night nearby, bathing us in a soft unnatural glow.

As I did at Southwold, I’ve decided to stay at Sizewell another day, and save the walk to the village of Butley until Monday morning. Today I will walk a few miles down the coast as far as the town of Aldeburgh, which the South Coast Path ahead misses to work its way around the expansive Alde estuary and avoid the inaccessible parts of Orford Ness.

At the fairly civilised hour of nine I decide to make a cup of tea on the burner. Unfortunately I have not rinsed out my mess tin thoroughly enough, and my tea ends up tasting strongly of the Jamaican “Mannish” Goat Soup, that I ate last night. Euugh! My nasty tea is spat out into the nettles nearby and I decide to go for a proper cooked breakfast at the Sizewell Beach Café Restaurant near the front, exploring the seafront on the way, taking pictures of boats and landing winches and the two large and disused looking platforms, like oil rigs, that stand just off the shore in front of the power stations, providing a rusty sanctuary for seagulls and other sea birds. At the café I also buy a Thorpeness to Orford footpath guide, which covers a lot of the walk ahead, and may prove useful. 

Sizewell beach, Cliff House in background

The path going south towards Aldeburgh first goes past a large gloomy looking grey stone building that looks like some dreadful school. It appears to be disused, or at least, it appears that it should be disused. The path goes under a tunnel beneath some grand flight of steps that lead, pointlessly, down to the beach. Rusty and locked iron gates in the tunnel deny you access to the stairs and grounds; they have a sinister dungeon-like appearance . The numbers on a  old broken iron weather vein outside indicate the place was built in 1909. Wikipedia tells me this is Sizewell Hall, a Christian Conference Centre, once a “progressive school”, which has “historic connections with a classic taxidermy collection”. Odd.

Further along, the cliff path shows serious signs of erosion; this part won’t be walkable for much longer. One part of a wooden fence has fallen over the side, another section rests on a lip of grass and topsoil with nothing of the sandy red cliff remaining under it.

Towards Thorpness, which sits halfway  between Sizewell and Aldeburgh, I sit for a while on a bench on a cliff edge green as swallows dart about and a huge Stenna Line ferry creeps in towards Felixstowe in the distance. Beyond that still, I can see a distant wind farm. With my binoculars I can pick out 65 wind turbines, and my view of the horizon is only partial, with bushes and so on in the way. Curiously the sails of each and every turbine is still, though it’s breezy enough where I am. Later in my walk I am to learn this is Greater Gabbard Wind Farm, which doesn’t start operating until next year.

Thorpeness has a golf course, a country club, and a boating lake with cafes and upmarket gift and antique shops. Most of it was built as a private holiday village 100 years ago for the wealthy Ogilvy family who owned the land from here to Sizewell (including Sizewell Hall, I also learn). Many of the buildings are covered in black clapboard, giving them a faux rustic appearance - New England style. It’s all very nice, but a great contrivance, like Portmeirion, the Welsh resort Patrick McGoohan chose for The Prisoner. The cafés and shops are busy with holiday visitors. Shall I stop for a coffee? No, let’s not bother, the throngs of people put me off. The village is known for its “House In The Clouds”; a disguised water tower appearing above the trees by the boating lake; a small brown clapboard house, as if on stilts, supported by a black clapboard tower. It’s available for holiday rent. The sign outside claims, in verse, that it is owned by fairies. It’s all rather too delightful and preposterous for my liking.

House In The Clouds, Thorpeness

Aldeburgh can be seen in the distance along the coast path. The path extends along a flat plain of grass, heather and wild flowers all clinging for life in a thin topsoil on a shingle platform. Nearer the town a I can see the sillhouette of a cockleshell shaped construction on the beach, circled by the various sillhouettes of children and adults. The Scallop is a sculpture by Maggie Hambling to celebrate Benjamin Britten, Aldeburgh’s illustrious former resident whose music, including the opera Peter Grimes, took much inspiration from the places and landscapes hereabout. 

Near Aldeburgh

A warm sunny summer Sunday, the town is very busy with visitors and residents milling around the front, exploring the sheds selling fresh fish on the beach, visiting the upmarket restaurants, eating fish and chips from the popular Aldeburgh fish shop on the promenade. The front is notable for many quirky and irregular houses and buildings. Outside a tiny pastel pink terraced residence three middle aged ladies sit outside engaged in lively conversation - I imagine they must be poets or writers of some kind- they have that bohemian, literary air, so in keeping with the appearance and reputation of the town.

On the high street that runs parallel with the sea shore one block in, there are restaurants, bookshops, art galleries and so on. All very up-market, and I’m looking for sustenance at the cheaper end of things. I finally find the Co-op I’m hoping for, and stock up on pasties, scotch eggs and fruit, which I eat on the green on a bench by the Moat House, a 500 year old building which for 400 years has been home to the town council and which also houses the town Museum.  Inside, a quiet, cool and pleasantly gloomy retreat from without, I look at a model of the village of the nearby village of Slaugden, most of which succumbed and was lost to the sea in 1935. A painting called The Town Worthies catches my eye; the stern and inscrutible faces of 19 prominent Victorian fishermen stare back at me, in their oilskins, sou’westers and silver neckbeards. A chronological sequence of photographs of the mayors and lady mayors of Aldeburgh from decades gone by also eye me magisterially further along the wall. I read about the railway that linked Aldeburgh with Saxemundham until Beeching closed it in 1966 (I plan to take the path that follows the old line on my way back to Sizewell), once upon a time, in the days before motor cars, railways connected most of the towns and villages along the Suffolk Coast.  I also admire a couple of impressive treasure chests that once upon a time found themselves washed up on the beach nearby.

Moat House, Aldeburgh

After a pint at the Mill Inn I walk inland a bit to the church where the path along the old railway track begins. It’s firm underfoot and straight - easy walking. I go through woods, ferns, fields; the sky has greyed over and somehow I’m zoned out, uninterested. Horses graze on the vegetated shingle towards the sea… what shall I do tonight back in Sizewell? There’s not a heck of a lot there - I can try the pub. I unwisely follow other walkers where the path forks to the right, and get drawn back towards Thorpeness again, along a path by the boating lake, then the House In The Clouds, then around the golf course. I come out onto a main road and past the Dolphin pub to find my way onto part of the Sandlings Walk, which goes back to Sizewell. The walkers who I’d made the mistake of following an hour before, a couple and a child, appear at the same time in the same sport, and I witness them have an ill tempered discussion about which way to go next. Forward from here the path is pleasanter, going through pretty heathland with vegetation similar to Dunwich Heath, and before too long Sizewell A emerges (in advance of B) above the trees, and I find my way back to the campsite.

In the evening I visit the Vulcan Arms, Sizewell’s only pub - it’s probably too small a village to merit having one really - The Vulcan sits directly outside the main gates to the Sizewell plants. The pub sign depicts Mr Spock from Star Trek, a military aircraft, and a god like character waving a hammer - The Vulcan Arms indeed! The pub has also turned a bit of land next to it into a camp site for mobile homes. They need to do something to up their turnover, so it seems, because inside it’s pretty deserted apart from a family I’ve seen on the camp site; one hefty drinker at the bar, his skinny, strange looking short haired wife, and their two flabby boys who squabble over the rules of pool in the games room. I wonder if they get much trade from the power plant workers? Perhaps once upon a time operatives would nip in and sink a couple at lunchtime - maybe a few still do - but I doubt it. There is little place in the modern working world for boozing during working hours, so my limited experience as a civil servant tells me, let alone around nuclear power stations. It’s the first pub I’ve been into that doesn’t serve Adnams; the Green King IPA I’m served is as lifeless as that found in London, as lifeless as this pub in fact. I exit.

Vulcan Arms, Sizewell

Saturday 6 August, 2011 - Southwold to Sizewell

To spare myself a couple of miles walk in the morning I decide to wait for the Southwold ferry to start working at 10 am, to get me quickly to Walberswick, the village on the other side of the harbour. Three others make the crossing across with me, along with the burly ferryman who takes my 90p fare. The other three, all in their sixties I guess, stop at a boatshed on the other side where a champagne breakfast is being served with a dozen other privileged morning boozers. Old school Tory hardcore!

Feeling fit and looking forward to the days walk, I march a few hundred yards down the path along the harbour and the boozy old tories in the boatshed, admiring the boats, moorings and curious shacks and sheds. “I’m on track”, I think to myself, all satisfied. Moments later, I think again. This is the path going back to Southwold, it’s going back the way I would have come if I had taken the longer route before the ferry started work. I stop and turn round towards the coast, NOW I‘m on track.

But soon I get lost again. The right path takes you out across a wooden bridge where children dangle bait to catch crabs for their buckets, then out across the grass and shingle towards the shore. Then the path becomes unclear, in the absence of the blue markers I don’t know whether to go along the shore or cut inland. I decide to go into the village to re-orientate myself. Still not clear,  I ask for directions from a sprightly lady out jogging with two dogs who is coming out onto the road from a footpath. My map shows me the Suffolk Coast Path takes you to a windmill, and so I ask her if this path goes to the windmill. She confirms it can, if I keep bearing off towards the sea, and so on I go.

The path goes past some allotments and then through farm land, and I pick up the Suffolk Coast Path markers again on the edge of the huge expanse of reeds and marshland that comprises the Westwood and Dingle Marshes, with Dunwich Forest in the distance. The conic rust red brick tower that was once a windmill can be seen ahead, sans sails. The path follows a water dyke all the way up to it. I stop to photograph hoverflies feasting on the yellow wild flowers growing by the path, which is another of those wooden platform over the marsh arrangements that traversed the “rough walking“ yesterday. My camera seems to be recovering now, but the autofocus refuses to work. In the far distance, I can see the white dome of the Sizewell B nuclear reactor further down the coast. Only about 6 ½ miles away as the seagull flies, but at least half as far again by the path. My campsite tonight is a little beyond in Sizewell village.

Westwood Marshes

Past the sail-less windmill the path curves on with the dyke. A woman cycles by with an easel, and I catch her up a little way on where she stops to set up and paint. I go through a gate with a grassy patch, near a wood, and stop for a while to take advantage of a soft dry place to sit. With two lifeless trees standing nearby the spot is like a set for Beckett’s Waiting For Godot . The weather is overcast but warm and kind. I wait, and wait, and no-one comes. Carrying on, I pass three pyres of twisted branches, side by side. Are they bonfires to be, or some kind of modern rustic sculpture?

Dingle Marshes

At Dunwich Forest the path weaves in and out on the forest’s edge. It’s a solid track fit for cars and tractors. Blackberries grow on the brambles along the path. I have planned to harvest wild fruit on my journey where I can, but by and large most blackberries till now have not been ripe. These brambles offer more in the way of ripe fruit, but they are well protected not only by their own thorns, but by the nettles that surround them. With my heavy pack, I am careful not to over-balance and tip myself into the brambles, which would have nasty and undignified consequences. Despite the obstacles, there is a percentage of the fruit that can be reached, ripe and good.

The church of Dunwich appears ahead. A group walk past including a spotty teenager with a Human League Dare T-shirt, which inspires me to muse upon what made the Sheffield electropop band so great.

Arriving in the town, I go past Dunwich church, then the museum, then the pub. I feel I should visit the museum because the history of Dunwich is fascinating, but everywhere is busy with tourists and cars and kids and mums and dads. I grumpily consume an over-priced pastie at the beach café where Lobster Thermidor and Sea Bass are also served. The food looks good but the prices and the middle class people irritate me. A mother calls for her son, “Saul! Saul”. What kind of heathen pre-christian name is Saul, for goodness sake? Saul!

Wanting to leave the crowds behind, I do Dunwich the injustice perhaps of leaving it behind to get back on the path. It is a short walk to the dramatic ruin of Dunwich Greyfriars friary, enclosed by an ancient wall in a field. With all the people I saw at the Dunwich beach café, not a single one has ventured here. What do these people come for? Just to drive from place to place, from meal to meal, and then drive on?

Dunwich Greyfriars

The ruins are of a 13th Century Franciscan Friary. In it’s day there were 14 other chapels and churches in Dunwich, but many would have been destroyed when storms and sea surges in 1286 and 1328 swept away large parts of the town, which was then a major sea port and the capital of East Anglia, literally washing large chunks of land and everything standing on it into the sea.

The path goes on through residential parts and then through the southern tip of Dunwich Forest, and then to the National Trust sign for Dunwich Heath, Mount Pleasant Farm. Underneath the sign another plaque says “PURCHASED WITH THE HELP OF PIZZA EXPRESS CUSTOMERS THROUGH THE NEPTUNE COASTLINE CAMPAIGN”. Quite what they helped to buy is not made clear.  Ahead of me, two walkers are consulting their map. I ask if they are OK, and I‘m reminded that Sebald got lost here. Standing in the centre of it, it is easy to see why; you are in a beautiful bowl of pastel coloured heather, mainly mauve with sprinklings of yellow (ling, I believe), and the horizon appears essentially the same in whatever direction you look. You cannot see the sea, you cannot see any hills in the distance, or buildings or other landmarks; all you can see is undulating heather bowl with a lining of trees at the edge. I stop for a while in the middle and take photographs to provide evidence of the fact. It is also a lovely peaceful place to stop, and the smattering of walkers who come by and chat to me all agree. 

Dunwich Heath

Dunwich heather

Unlike Sebald and the walkers, I have the benefit of having stayed on the Coastal Path, and I keep my bearings. I leave the heath and head coastwards, the ground still covered with the thick mauve heather. On the right, the doomy presence of Sizewell B looms larger. Ahead is a white building, a visitor centre near the cliffs, and from there it is a very straight path going to Sizewell along a sea wall. Inland there are extensive broads and I stop at a bird hide to rest up and look at the birds. With the help of a running commentary courtesy of a father and child sharing the hide with me, I identify a some redshanks, avocets, and a lonely cape shelduck which, not a British native,  must have escaped from some private collection somewhere. 

Sizewell ahead

Past a sluice there is still a couple of miles to go to Sizewell. As I approach the dome of the Sizewell B power station I laugh to myself as I imagine it exploding Monty Python style in front of me, leaving a shattered humpty dumpty egg shell smouldering by the shore. Eventually I near the plant. I’ve learnt already on my trip that a Sizewell C is being planned, and I go past a large fenced off piece of land marked “construction site” for which this is presumably intended. There is a grey stone ramp going up into the site, with a Suffolk Coastal District Council Public Notice pinned to it, proposing “retention of temporary hard r…[word illegible - ramp, road?] for a maximum period of three years”. Not the planning permission notice for a nuclear power station I was hoping to find exactly, but I know it is increasingly likely that it will be built.

Sizewell B is a working pressurised water reactor, Britain’s newest in fact, and the white dome is something of a futuristic adornment, encasing the twin-walled concrete containment building that protects the pressurised water reactor and its steam generators. Outside you hear a sound similar to that of distant jet engines at an airport. Whether this is the sound of the reactor itself, or of ventilators, or something else,  I don’t know.

Sizewell A is next along the path, an old school magnox generator decommissioned in the 90s. It’s huge brutalist concrete presence is in some ways more impressive than that of Sizewell B, it reminds me of the the National Theatre on the South Bank in London.

Sizewell A

At Sizewell there’s a car park and a café and up on the rising cliff ahead is the “club house” of Cliff House Park, which I booked by phone yesterday while I was in Southwold. The club house is a white painted building that provides a home for the people who run the site, and a bar, restaurant and basement games (ping pong, bar football etc) room for the kids. Paying my money in the reception/bar I am given a red metal putting green flag with the number “37” on it to mark my tent, and they tell me I can camp anywhere. I pitch up under trees at the far end of the camping field, near a few German family campers.

Weary, I go back to the club house hoping to be able to sit in comfort in the restaurant conservatory for the rest of the evening. I negotiate a cheese, ham and tomato toastie ten minutes after 6pm when hot food ceases to be served. A £4 a toastie, I’m not sure who is doing whom a favour here.

Anyway, I’m sat in the window, with my beer and my food, and I’m making a few notes in my book, and taking in the partial sea view. My hopes of settling into this  comfortable spot for the evening are dashed however, because Saturday night is bingo night here at Cliff House Park, and the limited number of tables are quickly filling up (with the exception of mine) by players old and young (mainly old) anticipating a possible full house and a high old time. I’m asked if I want to play. Declining, I decide I’d better shift myself and give up my table for those queuing up to play. Relocated outside on the veranda with my Adnams under a gazebo, I listen to the bingo caller commence the game, played with playing cards instead of numbers, “Jack of Hearts, Ten of Spades, Seven of Heart…” etc, etc. The first winner calls “house!”. The next game commences. Soon the game inspires hysterical laughter from some participants, which is repeated, variously and periodically, by others. Don’t tell me bingo isn’t any fun; I’ve heard ‘em playing it, and it’s hilarious, apparently.

The game finally done, it’s time for an old time singalong. They’ve got one of those old 70s electic organ in the club house, and some old feller is squeezing out all the cockney favourites; “My Old Man”, “The Old Bull and Bush”, “I do like to be beside the seaside”, “The Lambeth Walk“, “Maybe It‘s Because I‘m A Londoner“, the list goes on and on and on, and it’s amazing how many of them I know all the words to, like a race memory. In the background, the Sizewell B reactor no doubt hums along. Funny, I started the day on a rowing boat taking a select few to the Southwold conservatives’ boathouse champagne breakfast, now I’m sitting here listening in on the working class bingo and caravan club cockney knees-up. Where am I in all this? I am a watching and I am a listening. And I ain’t nowhere.

Friday 5 August, 2011 - Southwold and round about

It’s a lovely bright sunny summer morning. I have tea and porridge for breakfast in the sunshine. My tent, pitched near the pathway to the camp facilities, is attracting a bit of attention on account of its smallness, in a campsite full of all the latest in camping extravagances. Once chap comes by and tells me that his daughter is fascinated by how little I’m travelling with, and that she thinks I’m “really hardcore”. Hmmm, I think, thanks for sharing that with me; not often a man comes up to you and tells you his daughter is fascinated with you. Anyway, move on.

I amble up into the town, past stylish “cottages” and smart townhouses that are characteristic of Southwold, many neatly set on a grassy common. It’s another “Chelsea-on-Sea” as people like to call it (Brancaster village in Norfolk that I visited last year is another) thought people here are more predominantly representative of the traditional conservative type than those of trendy SW3. There are plenty of tea rooms; this week’s theatrical event is proudly advertised by a banner spanning the high street.

My first stop is the Sailor’s Reading Room, which having stopped at yesterday appears to be an ideal place for me to write up notes of my journey so far. Yesterday I was in no great position to appreciate the place, but today it comes into its own. The reading room has been here since 1864, built in memory of an officer from the Battle of Trafalgar, it was intended as a place for sailors, coastguards and lifeboatmen to meet, away from the pubs and other distractions. Today it is still frequented by local seafarers, working and retired. 

Sailor's Reading Room, Southwold

Though you can see pictures of the exterior of the Reading Room on the web, photographs are expressly forbidden inside, and in any case my camera is still very sick, so here is a little description.

The inside of this brick built single storey building has a vaulted ceiling (following the line of the roof) and is divided into two halves, front and back, by a wooden partition wall. The front part that you enter from the front door is the Reading Room itself, and on the other side through a wooden door in front of you is the games room, which is open only to members, with access by a combination lock. On the right as you go in, there is a long wooden table with room for ten chairs around it (four down each side, and one at both ends). On it are newspapers and a few books, including Southwold: An Earthly Paradise by Geoffrey C. Munn, an excellent large format pictorial book of essays covering the history, industry and art of the town. On the right hand wall are also a number of upright easy chairs of the type you might expect to see in an old people’s home. On the other (left) side of the room, there is another table with benches around it, which has a number of glass cases with ships models and archaic fishing tools on display in them. And further to the left against the wall are more glass cases which contain more ship models and tools, as well as pictures and photographs and objects of curiousity or interest relating to the local seafaring industries. On the wooden dividing wall aforementioned, there are mounted four quite large ships’ figureheads. The first is male and in admiral’s uniform, and may be intended to represent Nelson, though if so the resemblance does not seem a very good one. The other three figureheads are of the more traditional female variety. Every other bit of wall space that can be reached is covered with photographs and pictures, mainly of sailors, though pictures of ships, boats and their crews are also up there.

I sit, read Munn’s Southwold, and write my notes. For a while, two old seamen, presumably members, come and sit down to talk to each other about goings on in the town. One bemoans the lack of activity in preparation for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Tourists and sightseers pop in and out too, looking around and dropping money in the collection box as they go out (the Reading Room is run as a charity and funded by voluntary contributions). One gentleman, seeing me writing at the table and supposing me to be there in an official capacity, thanks me as he leaves. It’s nice to feel part of the furniture for a while and I don’t trouble to correct him.

When the afternoon comes, I head out into the town and find a few things in the Co-op to eat (high street supermarkets in Suffolk are invariably Co-ops). I walk past a newsagent and see the newspaper headlines - EURO CRISIS SENDS SHARES CRASHING - is this the beginning of the double dip recession?

Southwold has two tall landmarks, one is the white lighthouse rising from the heart of the town by the promenade, and the other a concrete water tower slightly inland on Southwold Common. It is in front of the water town that I stop and eat a cornish pasty for lunch. At the foot of the water tower is the circus tent for the Wild West Show, and after my lunch I walk round it where horses and llamas graze behind temporary fences.

I decide to explore the part of the Suffolk Coast Path that I missed yesterday by taking the shorter route down the beach. I take the A1095 going north out of Southwold, and then take a right turn into the next-door village of Reydon, a pleasant enough settlement of houses old and not so old. While I’m lost for a moment, looking for the a Suffolk Coast Path marker, an elderly walker, in his 70s I’d guess and wearing light shorts, a polo shirt and trainers, comes pacing my way, and I ask him directions. About the location of the Suffolk Coast Path he knows nothing (as is usually the case with people you meet out walking), but he’s an experienced and enthusiastic walker and talker, and I listen for ten minutes or so to his  various accounts of walks he’s taken around and about the county, and the health benefits to be had thereby, and then about bicycling, and then about the new bicyclie he is on his way to buy. I strain to follow what he’s saying on account of his thick Suffolk country accent, and while I half-listen to his rambling  narrative I surreptitiously scrutinise his wiry, veiny legs and knobbly knees. Eventually we part. He is the only walker I am to see all day.

The path goes along Covert Road  through the middle of Reydon. On the left are some little almshouses in a gated square, grouped around neat lawns, rose bushes, and a statue in the middle of an old woman, seated and with her hands occupied on her lap, perhaps with needlecraft or some other suitable occupation for an old maid or widow woman. A pretty setting; but each house has a christian exhortation in bold black lettering on white stucco backgrounds above the doorways - “BE KIND SWIFTLY”, “DO UNTO OTHERS…” enough to make it intolerable, surely,  for any sane person to live here.

I go right down a narrower road leading to the charmingly named Smear Farm, where new houses are being built next to the existing, and very modern looking, farmhouse. Then comes a path, which is overgrown and nettly, going alongside pastures. The spongy path goes up a hill a way, and it is slow progress until I get to the road, which going left heads for South Cove.

Over the crest of the hill the hedgerows disappear and an expanse or reedbeds open out on both sides. At a small bridge that crosses a wide stream leading into Easton Broad I stop and admire a huge swan nestling majestically in the reeds, preening itself. Its once orange bill is bleached with age, almost white.

Near South Cove

The path leaves the road to the right to cross an area marked on the OS map as “Rough Walking”. The reeds are as high as my head and the path is a platform made of wooden sleepers meshed together with chickenwire; as my boots clonk along the wooden path, I wonder what marshy mess lies below. Further down I find out; the path is waterlogged in some places, and at one point I step forward hoping to feel the wooden path a few inches below to support me, but instead my left foot sinks straight down to my ankle into the mucky squelch below. Fortunately my right foot following finds something more solid and I’m able to heave my left foot out. Five minutes on and the path becomes grassy and overgrown with nettles and brambles too, and these crowd in and nag at my bare legs that show between my wooly socks and shorts. Then I come to the end of the reedbed, and climb up a little hill towards an fine oak tree and sit and look across the reed beds to where Easton Broad is before the seashore. Gaggles of geese rise from the invisibe pools from time to time, making a distant racket. With my binoculars I pick out a pretty bright brown bird with a lighter breast, sitting atop the branches of a bush, perhaps a bearded tit. I sniff my marsh mud saturated boot and sock - it smells rank and rotten.

Going back the way I came, I am lost in my thoughts. It is a beautiful day, which after yesterday’s rain comes as a great relief, but the sunshine has not entirely brightened my mood. I ponder my preference for travelling alone. As a child on holidays I would often wander off and explore on my own, rather than play with other kids. It is better, I have thought, to do a walk like this alone, because you are free to manage your time without compromise or consideration for the wishes of another,without needing to please or consider anyone else, and to come and go on impulse. The downside to the solitary approach is, of course, that you can get lonely, and being alone you may be inclined more to introspection,  which, depending on events and the vaguaries of your mood, may not be happy. Today I question my inclination to be alone; why do I want to do this, rather than go and have fun with other people? Do I really want to be doing this? Right now, as I  walk back dodging oncoming cars along this winding high hedged road, the answer is not really, frankly, no. But I don’t know what I want, and the clockwork hiking toy that is me keeps going, spring coiled, tramp, tramp, tramp, by field and farm, tramp tramp, back towards Smear Farm, then on to Reydon.

In Reydon again, I am in want of a cold drink, or some fruit, or an ice cream, or something; something comforting, or refreshing. Inside the village grocers shop that I hadn‘t seen when coming the other way, a ripe peach in my basket selected from the rack outside, everything inside me stops. Over the speakers in the shop, clear and sweet, Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done” is playing. A song of love and loss, pain and grief, so beautiful, so familiar, and so meaningful to me and to my music loving community, at such an unexpected and incongruous time and place, with me somewhat physically and emotionally drained - I am stunned. I walk the aisles of the shop, enraptured, crushed but alive. Drinking in the music and the moment, I take deep breaths and purse my lips to choke back the tears.

Back at Southwold, early evening, I bump into a couple outside a pub near the white lighthouse and the Adnams brewery, who know me from my Sunday music event Come Down and Meet the folks. We have a couple of jars on the bench outside in the sunshine, then they’re off, and I grab a couple of tinnies at the Adnams shop in town, going past the great Adnams brewery on the way, and then buy some cooked chicken in the Co-op, which brewed up in one of my packets of chicken noodle broth makes a passable chicken stew back at the campsite. 

Adnam's brewery, Southwold

Southwold