After a crazy few days in Somerset, Bristol and London, once again trying to sort out my flat (in London) I return to Suffolk. All of this movement is highly irregular and irresponsible in the present climate.
Everything about today is grey. The sky. The sea. My mood. The start point is St James Church. How I’ve always loved places by the sea with their reliance on the great unknown on their doorstep, for small communities often the giver but also the taker of life.
A simple symbol of a ship adorns the village sign here like at nearby Walberswick although – not unlike the place – Walberswick is a bit grander.
As always I am alone. I prefer walking alone. With someone else you miss out on half the experience while you chat. Of course it’s fun but not if you’re trying to get under the skin.
As often happens I soon realise that I’ve been here before but I can’t remember when. The same thing happened when I was going round Minsmere the other day. The other thing about this solo walking is that the walking is never linear, always circuitous so if I ever make it to Lowestoft (where the path ends) I will have walked probably more than twice the length. It’s all part of the fun though isn’t it? And it’s not like I’m short of time right now.
Like much of the SCP, a lot of the path actually isn’t on the coast so sometimes I have to cut a few corners and just head up the beach. I can see myself doing this at Walberswick and certainly above Southwold where I want to be by the sea and often in it too.
The path is a track for much of this section passing along the Eastern edge of Dunwich Forest, the sea marshes off to the left. Everything feels brittle today. Is that just me? Of course.
Amazing how weather can change a place. Suffolk seems prone to this. Sometimes, even in Summer, it can appear featureless.
There aren’t many people out today. Or not here. Everything feels sluggish, mired by the greyness. The track winds through more patchy woodland and then becomes a vague pathway through the marshes, the ghost of the track that I was on just now, distinguishable only by being paler than the grass that surrounds it.
The woods are behind me and the sky is suddenly, terrifically fathomless like an ocean. I feel like an irrelevance. It’s strangely comforting, similar to how I feel when I am out there in the metallic North Sea. Always reminiscent of the infinite, a reminder of the unknown, like a planet moving through space only aware of its own movement.
This is true Suffolk flatness. Bleak beauty. Worlds away from the cosy voluptuousness of a Dorset or Devon. There is space to unravel my thoughts. Small details take on new significance.
It dawns on me how much water there is everywhere here and I kick myself for not appreciating these wildernesses on my footstep before now.
North and West of me is Westwood Marshes, which according to the Natural England information board has ‘one of the largest reedbeds in the UK’. Twitchers’ delight! And although they’re not out today I have seen many of them before – distracted looking men (normally) who give you a vague ‘hello’ before quickly clamping binoculars to face.
I reach the one cut-through here between waterways over boarded walkways and back onto the grey, brown beach and the grey-brown sea which washes itself around a stump in the water that I’ve seen and wondered at before. What is it? Why is it there? Once again I turn South into the wind and ponder my journey home.
The Slow Walker 