Reed beds and reactors

11 Apr Reed beds and reactors

We spent the weekend in coastal Suffolk, my daughter and I. It’s been a while since we had the time to take a trip, do some walking, fall into step and into conversations that unfold gradually as the landscape cradles our feet. 

On Saturday we leave the car at Ferry Road car park in Walberswick and head away from the weekend crowds, up the gentle hill south and west of the village – though ‘hill’ is problematic in the context of coastal Suffolk. For this one, the map registers a contour of 15 metres above sea level – at the risk of sounding philistine, why bother? Hill is hardly the word – a teeny bit of higher ground is closer to the mark. Though the land between here and the sea may well be below sea level, held by the raised gravel beach (for now), so one has the feeling of greater elevation.

The trail winds through trees (birch and alder, the guide informs) just starting to bud on paths lined with gorse in full spring bloom. Shut your eyes, breathe in and you’re on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean, inhaling essence of Ambre Solaire. There are views over the marshes that lie between here and the sea, a liminal land of tall, pale reeds waving feathery heads in the gentle breeze. Dropping down again, we criss-cross reed beds on boardwalks just as a pair of lapwings decide to put on an aerial display. I’m not very good at spotting birds, mainly because they never stay still for long enough, but the lapwing is my favourite and I recognise its distinctive call and the shape of its wings as it rises and swoops. If this was a pair, they would have courted last autumn and now, perhaps be incubating eggs, so the display may have been to see off predators (like us?). Guesswork, of course…

We’d loaded up some lunch at the Two Magpies Bakery – where your eyes are guaranteed to be bigger than your stomach – so, at the top of another ‘hill’, we feast on Moroccan vegan sausage roll (I know!) and marmite muffin (at least she does while I eschew, being firmly in the half of the population who hate the stuff), perched on a wooden seat perfectly positioned for a rest and a gentle view. Back through Dunwich Forest, partly managed conifer and partly restored to native species, down again towards the shore, through reed beds either side of the river where solitary swans peck and graze at the banks and a ruined mill that used to drain the salt marsh recalls a distant past. 

In some weathers, this landscape can feel bare and desolate – flat, monochrome, even forbidding. But the morning mist gave way each day to glorious afternoons allowing colour to creep back. A stone’s throw from Sizewell, it can feel forbidding in another, more existential sense, the concrete monoliths of the nuclear power station seeming alien and menacing. On Sunday we walk in its shadow and try, as the walk guide suggests, to put our prejudices aside – though still an edge of something tingles in the muscles of my back as we walk along the path between the high security fence and the beach. Yet the play of sea mist and sunlight on the huge pale buildings gives them an aura of something almost mythical or other-worldly as the morning draws on into the afternoon. The brutal architecture has a certain chiselled beauty and, through the mist, the big white dome that houses the pressurised water reactor is like a frosty winter moon fallen to earth.

Like on all good walks, the conversation waxed and waned over the two days as we pointed to things and shared them, then fell silent and reached into our own thoughts. Or just let our minds be empty for a while and allowed the sensations to take over: the brush of air against the skin, the feel of the heartbeat calibrating to the rhythm of walking, the cool of the breeze and the warmth of the sun on our backs.