Ipswich; Saturday, 10 July, 2021

With all honesty I hadn’t heard about the Netflix drama The Dig until a colleague mentioned it a couple of weeks earlier when I’d mentioned I was planning on visiting Sutton Hoo. It’s lucky they did mention how popular it was as it turns out it had lead to a surge of bookings from people hoping to visit the dig site at Sutton Hoo, so it was with some luck that I managed to get one of the last available ticket slots for today when I booked some three weeks earlier.

After heading out into the morning drizzle from the hotel I walked the short distance to the Old Cattle Market bus station and caught an early bus through to the town of Woodbridge, which is where Sutton Hoo is normally described as being. In reality, Woodbridge is the nearest largest town with the actual site being some way away from the town centre – a feasible walk from Melton railway station, or – if you’re feeling lazy – served by four buses a day from Woodbridge town centre. It turns out that most people who visit Sutton Hoo do so by car as the bus was empty, but the car park was pretty full.

Due to the bus schedule I arrived towards the end of my 30 minute ticket window, which meant I avoided most of the crowds and was able to quickly get into the High Hall exhibition where they give some background to the tribes that were inhabiting the area at the time, the suspected King who was buried in the mound, and some stunning reproductions of the treasures that were found in the grave (the originals now being on display at the British Museum in London). After looking round that exhibition I walked over to Tranmer house, home of Edith Pretty whose land Sutton Hoo was found on, and was one of the driving forces behind the excavation taking place. The house has been restored to how it would have looked during those days in 1939 when the dig took place. From the house there is then a signed path that takes you to the burial mounds.

Having taken in the exhibition and mounds I wandered back to the main entrance and was going to grab a quick bite to eat in the café, but the queue was moving so slowly that I seriously doubted that I would make the bus in three hours time, let alone the bus that was due in less than 30 minutes, so instead I grabbed a bottle of water from the shop and then headed back over to the bus stop to catch the bus back down into Woodbridge.

I had a short connection in Woodbridge and then I was back out again on the bus, this time heading to the coast and the town of Aldeburgh. The bus crosses through the Suffolk countryside, from rolling hills and flat fens to the, on the day I visited, misty coast.

Aldeburgh has seen its fortunes come and go over time, and mostly all down to the nature of the coast round here. Whilst chunks of Norfolk are regularly swallowed up by the sea, the opposite is happening here, with the debris from further up the coast being deposited here through longshore drift. At one time Aldeburgh was an important port at the mouth of the Alde River. It built an impressive town hall during Tudor times and had a fishing fleet and a ship building industry that made it one of the most important towns on the East coast. But as the tide brought more sediment and debris with it the harbour and port silted up. And land that now stretches down to Orford Ness and beyond has moved the mouth of the river some 10 miles to the south, though at the same time nibbling away at parts of the land and taking the small fishing village of Slaughden that was to the immediate south of the town with it – the last part of the village finally succumbing to sea in the mid 1930s

Today the Tudor town hall is still standing as the Moot Hall and houses the towns small, but interesting museum that tells the history of Aldeburgh and Slaughden, as well as highlighting some of the important sons and daughters of the town – including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a surgeon in Britain, who even served as mayor of the town.

From the centre of town it’s a pleasant mile or so walk south along the coast, past the site of where Slaughden used to exist to the Martello Tower. Martello Towers were built at the beginning of the 19th century as a way to protect the English coast from attack from the continent, with just over 100 being built. The one at Aldeburgh is the most Northerly, with the towers stretching south and west back along the coast all the way round Essex, Kent and East Sussex to Seaford. Possibly more impressive is to consider that when this Martello Tower was built it was at the end of the harbour – much of the land to the south of the tower has been created by the sea in less than 200 years.

I could have spent longer looking round Aldeburgh, but the last bus of the evening is at 6pm and after that it would have been an expensive taxi ride at least as far back as the railway station at Saxmundham, if not all the way to Ipswich, so I made sure I was at the bus stop in plenty of time to make the last bus of the evening back.

Back in Ipswich I went for a wander to find some dinner and then headed back to the hotel for a well-deserved rest.