What Happened At Shingle Street?
The Suffolk coast has a way of generating stories
There’s something liminal and transient about the coast of Suffolk, it’s a place where everything is subject to change. It’s where the sea fights the land and while the land occasionally wins a battle and gathers enough force to build a drained marsh or a spit of sandy land along the coast, the sea, determined and relentless, is winning the war.
This is the coast where the legends talk of old Dunwich, dragged down beneath the waves and then even further back in the deep time when this wasn’t even a coast, just the route to Doggerland, that vast Neolithic country now deep beneath the melted glaciers that make up the North Sea.
The beaches here are shingle, not sand, this is a place that feels like it’s never heard of sand, never found the time to grind down anything in to it. Instead, millions of pebbles form a temporary barrier between the marshes and the sea. There are no cliffs here, no hillsides sloping away to high ground above the sea, just flat land dotted with trees shaped by the wind, high crowns of branches and leaves atop tall bare trunks.
Shingle isn’t comfortable to walk on, and it never feels entirely safe underfoot. Sand has a softness to, cushioning your feet and gently requesting you go slower. Shingle crunches…
