Suffolk

The focus of this blog is Cambridge, but Cambridge is of course embedded in a larger landscape. We’re in the county of Cambridgeshire, which is part of East Anglia, which is an area within the East of England, an official region of England, which is part of Great Britain, which is part of the United Kingdom (which is no longer part of the European Union). Learning these nested names reminds me of being a kid in the United States before I had a solid sense of what was higher in the geographical hierarchy, a state or a country. East Anglia is more of a historical geography than an administrative one. It’s the easternmost knob of England sticking out into the North Sea, including the counties of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk, and is known for its flatness. Let me take you across the flat fenland to the big open spaces of Suffolk, all the way to the seaside.

A regional church meeting was the excuse for my first foray outside of the Cambridge area since coming back to the UK in October. A friend and I carpooled the hour’s drive to Ipswich, where we heard church members from Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and Essex give talks. Ipswich is the biggest city in Suffolk and sits near the mouth of the River Orwell, a stone’s throw from the coast. My friend and I only knew that after the meeting we wanted to explore and set eyes on the sea, possibly at the closest port town, Felixstowe. Luckily, I asked for recommendations from a church leader from Ipwisch whose Instagram account is always rich with photos of the local landscape. Felixstowe is industrial and not worth visiting, he said, and instead suggested Aldeburgh, a seaside town forty minutes away.

Not only was Aldeburgh exactly the charming, quintessential Suffolk town we were looking for, but the way there crossed our path with several serendipities. First was Sutton Hoo, which I had been interested in visiting since watching the Netflix film The Dig about the famous excavations of Anglo-Saxon burial mounds there, but I had forgotten it was so close to Ipswich. It was right on the route to Aldeburgh, so we turned into the National Trust parking lot (and though I had forgotten my sadly dusty membership card that I bought right before the pandemic, they let us off the hook for paying). Sutton Hoo turned out to be more impressive as a nature reserve, with a surprising array of landscapes, than as a historical site, though it was that. The Anglo-Saxon burial mounds were lumpy and irregular and not particularly big, covered in brush and gorse and grazing rare-breed sheep with curly horns. On the other side of the path was a large hog farm. The viewing tower over the main burial mound, the famous one with the ship and burial treasures, was closed, so we didn’t get much of a sense for it. Also closed were the visitor center and the exhibits in the “Tranmer house,” an austere-looking “Tudor revival” mansion up on the hill where Edith Pretty, the heroine of The Dig, lived, but which definitely wasn’t the one filmed in the movie—that was in Surrey and much more on-brand for English countryside. The real house grew on me, though—I liked the way the cream and black trim stood out against the muted landscape and the sweeping sky.

We followed the green-edged paths down around the woods and along a road overlooking the River Debe, a wide tidal river which Ralph Fiennes was filmed crossing on the ferry with his bike—the closest they got to filming at Sutton Hoo itself. We saw a large herd of roe deer running across the meadows on its bank. In the pine and beech woods there were bluebells and daffodils and we talked about fairy magic.

Running deer

Finally we got back in the car and carried on along the narrow winding roads toward the seaside, but it wasn’t long before something else caught my eye—Snape Maltings, the brown site-of-interest road signs were saying, and suddenly there was an imposing row of old Victorian industrial buildings right on the road that utterly emanated romance. I asked my friend to turn the car around so we could check it out. With no prior context, we gradually pieced together that it was an old barley malting mill on the river Alde (on the edge of the village of Snape, which I could not for the life of me disassociate from Severus) and was now a collection of high-end shops and arts establishments. The lady in the art gallery (full of paintings of impressionistic skies and fields) told us through her mask and plastic shield a bit about the history and something half-audible about the famous composer Bri…Pears and a concert hall. I was thrown off by the Pears part and didn’t realize until we saw the Britten-Pears recital rooms that she was talking about Benjamin Britten, whose music I’ve played and listened to. I looked him up on Wikipedia and found that that Britten (and his partner, Peter Pears) had lived in Aldeburgh, founded a world-class music festival there, and turned the mill into a concert hall when the festival got too big for Aldeburgh. It’s still the site of the Aldeburgh Festival—I’m sad I didn’t know about it before Covid! But stumbling on it this way has its own deeply satisfying charm.

Even before we pieced together the significance of the history, we were deep in the thrill of the semi-decayed back alleys of the complex. They were probably technically off-limits but the one-way system exit of the gallery had deposited us in a quiet lane away from the main courtyard that drew us along under the towering, ivy-veined brick walls. There were eerie cantilevered clapboard sheds with peeling paint, iron beams sticking out of the bricks, plants tumbling out of in cracks, rickety concrete bridges between top floors of buildings, and finally a series of crumbling brick archways with broken windows into empty shells with trees growing in them. It was one of the most delicious abandoned industrial dreamscapes I’ve seen. What is it about these places that’s so enchanting?

We had also seen the river shimmering through grassy marshes beside the complex and lots of signs advertising Nature, so we went on to find a nature trail. The first view out over the open marshy fields, skyswept and full of skylark song and a kestrel, nearly brought me to tears. It’s hard to explain, because it just looks like a field in the photos, perhaps with some nice trees in the distance. The depth and quality of light don’t make it into the camera. We walked out through the reedbeds and into a small wood, but realized it wasn’t taking us to the river like we expected; it was part of a much larger loop to the village of Iken that we could have done on a different serendipitous day if it were earlier; instead we turned back and found the much shorter boardwalk into the tall grass and to the river, which the map had probably been pointing us to. This spot had the strongest resemblance to The Dig, and I found out later that they had indeed filmed at Snape Maltings, probably the scene where Ralph Fiennes, reveling in the recent uncovering of the boat, sits on a grassy bank with his pipe, and a silent boat with red sails comes into the frame, mystical and timeless until the man on board says hello—one of my favorite scenes in the film (which, by the way, I’m less enamored with than it may sound like, but it does have such beautiful cinematography and shots of Suffolk, where they happen).

On to the seaside, we finally said, and drove the short remaining leg to Aldeburgh. We followed signs through affluent neighborhoods to Thorpeness Beach, which turned out to be a long stretch of pebble beach, rather severe in the wind and cloud-glare, but the North Sea was there, roaring. I suggested we go toward the buildings in the distance that looked like a beachfront (Thorpeness Beach was actually one village down from Aldeburgh). We walked (slow-going) along the ridge of pebbles piled by the tides, my friend lost in the “therapeutic sounds” and me mostly looking at the delightful variety of stones—lots of red and flint and white.

We eventually reached the beginning of a row of what looked like beached boats; on closer inspection they were on rollers and wheels, waiting to go down the pebble ridge into the water, and on the street-side were fish shack after fish shack advertising their fresh wares (“Anything fresher would be swimming.”) None of them seemed open, though a small party was doing their own private delicious-smelling grilling at one shack. There were some very rustic-picturesque rowboats beached on the pebbles with seagulls posing obligingly; colorful jumbles of junkyard were equally interesting. We wandered up to the street, found the apparently famous “Moot Hall” I had seen earlier on an advertisement or Wikipedia or something, a small, quirky freestanding half-timbered brick building that was once a town hall 500 years ago. Then the true seaside town begin in earnest, the high street crammed with boutiques and ice cream shops and charming villas and flats. I noticed the Jubliee Hall mentioned in the Wikipedia article as the original site of the Aldeburgh Festival, but failed to realize that one of Benjamin Britten’s residences was a few houses down—I also missed the chance to go find his more famous Red House and his grave, sadly; I didn’t read about this until later. Serendipity didn’t quite come full circle.

It was stunningly quiet, most shops closed, but a few people drifted through the street with paper bags of fish and chips. My friend noted this and traced them to an open shop, where we duly got ours. At the same time, I spotted a delicious narrow stairway up to the next street, which gave us a view over terraced gardens and red tile rooftops and a little bit of ocean. We struggled with the little wooden forks and finally just used our fingers, walking somewhat distractedly while eating, on past pastel-painted terraced houses and cottages with flint-and-brick walls to the other end of the town, and on down the beach toward some distant industrial towers, warning off the seagulls stalking us. Eventually we turned back and retraced our steps; thankfully now the golden hour made the pebbles and the surf a bit easier on the eyes, but the wind was still battering. We found the clam sculpture that marked our parking lot (would have been lost without it) and called it a day.

The drive back to the main motorway was both gorgeous—twisting through rolling green fields vibrant with golden hour—and harrowing, as my friend, native to the British countryside, drove quite aggressively on the narrow curves. I thanked my lucky stars for not being too prone to carsickness and focused on the Suffolk charm.

We passed many other signs pointing to sites of serendipitous allure–a castle I had visited on an earlier trip (which deserves its own retrospective post), another castle I had never seen, nature reserves and more seaside towns. Maybe I’ll come back for the Aldeburgh Festival someday.