Discover A Song Of Suffolk

Magnificent nature reserves, huge skies and a wild, open coast. Welcome to the quiet drama of Suffolk in autumn, says Mark Cocker

- Mark Cocker

“All where the eye delights, yet dreads to roam,

The breaking billows cast the flying foam,

Upon the billows rising – all the deep, Is restless change; the waves so swell’d and steep,

Breaking and sinking, and the sunken swells,

Nor one, one moment, in its station dwells”

This wonderful description of the waves rolling up the shingle is taken from ‘The Borough’ by the great poet of Suffolk coastal life George Crabbe (1754-1832). He was born in Aldeburgh and brought up in Orford, and no one knew better than Crabbe how the local beaches and sea were in a state of constant flux. For no stretch of English shoreline is more subject to change than the 30-mile belt between the tiny coastal villages of Covehithe and Shingle Street – with its extraordinary low-lying mix of tidal spit, deserted shoal, grazing marsh, salt flat, estuarine mud and pebble beach.

One very modern type of change is the relentless erosion that is more pronounced here than anywhere else in Britain. In the 40 years that I have been visiting the village of Covehithe, for instance, its beautiful church has ‘moved’ more than 160 metres closer to the beach. Yet the vulnerability of the shore once carried other connotations. Suffolk’s long outward-curving profile presented great temptation to smugglers sailing between Europe and England, and the quiet paths that still link Aldeburgh and Snape, and which are great today for birdwatchers, were used to sneak ashore contraband barrels of brandy or tobacco.