Suffolk
The Shape of It
Sea, shingle, slow rivers, and a coastline that cannot decide whether to stay or go.
Suffolk is a county of eastern England that faces the North Sea without buffer or apology and has been paying for the arrangement ever since. The coast here is the fastest-eroding in Europe. Every winter the cliff loses a little more to the water. Villages that appear on old maps are now memory and shingle. The land, overall, is flat — agricultural, open, sky-heavy — which explains both the quality of its light and the particular stubbornness of its people.
The county’s rivers are slow, wide-mouthed, and given to meander. The Orwell, the Deben, the Stour, the Blyth — all drift through saltmarsh and reed before giving themselves up to the sea. The most eccentric is the Alde, which rises near Laxfield and flows southeast toward the sea quite sensibly, then at Aldeburgh turns south and runs parallel to the shore for sixteen miles with only the great shingle bar of Orfordness between it and the waves. It does not actually reach the sea until Shingle Street, which is exactly as bleak and beautiful as it sounds.
Suffolk has more crinkle-crankle walls than the rest of England combined. These serpentine brick walls — called “crinkle crankle” only in Suffolk, nowhere else — were built chiefly in the seventeenth century, often by Dutch engineers draining and farming the lower land. The word splices Old English crincan (wavy) with the Dutch kronkel (winding). The wavy form is not whimsy: the corrugation gives structural strength and, counterintuitively, uses fewer bricks than a straight wall of the same height. Suffolk has over fifty. The rest of England, in total, has fewer.
The houses of Lavenham, Kersey, Long Melford and Cavendish are often painted in what is called Suffolk pink: a pale, dusty rose that looks organic because it once was. The traditional lime-wash was mixed with pig’s blood, sloe juice, or occasionally red ochre. Modern conservation rules in many villages require owners to repaint in the exact original shade when it is time to refresh the walls. Estate agents have learned to describe it as “period blush.”
The Drowned City
What Dunwich was, and what it became, and what the sea said about the matter.
At its height in the thirteenth century, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles and a major international port. It had eighteen churches and chapels, a Knights Templar preceptory, a Franciscan friary, a marketplace, a guildhall, and a population of around ten thousand — making it, in area, the same size as the City of London, though considerably more modest in population. Ships from Dunwich traded with France and the Low Countries. The harbour was one of the busiest on the east coast. Then the sea intervened.
Two great storms in 1287 and 1328 broke the harbour, blocked the river mouth with shingle, and tore several hundred houses into the waves. The Black Death came in 1348. The skilled labour left. The fishing fleet dwindled. The wealthy had already gone. A shingle spit drifted south and sealed off the port from large vessels. The town shrank. The cliff kept eating. Over the following four centuries, the churches went over the edge one by one — St Leonard’s, St Michael’s, St Bartholomew’s, St Martin’s, St Nicholas’, all consumed. By 1602 the town was a quarter of its former size. By the 1700s it was a village. And the cliff kept coming.
The last church tower, All Saints, finally fell in 1919 in a waterfall of dead men’s bones. Skulls and femurs from the tilted graveyard tumbled onto the beach with the masonry. Bone still occasionally appears in the eroding cliff. To this day, local legend holds that in certain weathers you can hear the church bells tolling beneath the waves. Acoustic surveys have confirmed the presence of eight churches on the seabed, their walls largely intact, lying in ten metres of water less than a mile from the current shore. Whether the bells ring, the surveys declined to say.
As late as 1832, Dunwich was still returning two Members of Parliament to Westminster. Its electorate at that point consisted of a handful of people and a great deal of water. The Reform Act that year abolished it as a rotten borough, though it is fair to say that nature had been trying to do the same thing for five hundred years.
“Dunwich is not even the ghost of its dead self; almost all you can say of it is that it consists of the mere letters of its old name.”
— Henry James, visiting Dunwich, 1897
Algernon Swinburne, who visited in the early 1870s, wrote a long poem about the place called By the North Sea, picturing the view from the ruins and meditating on what it meant that the sea had taken so much that had once been certain. He was the right poet for the job; he liked ruins. Turner had painted the clifftop church a century earlier. The site continued to attract people who felt that watching something disappear was a useful occupation. W. G. Sebald walked the Suffolk coast in 1992 and wrote about Dunwich in The Rings of Saturn, which describes the landscape as having “the quality of a thing which is never entirely there.” He was not wrong. The entire city is now the largest medieval underwater site in Europe.
Notable Folk
People who changed the world, named things after their dead daughters, or broke out of gaol in a sailor’s disguise.
The Local Tongue
One of the oldest surviving dialects in England — not Norfolk, not Essex, but something older than both.
Suffolk dialect is directly descended from the language of the East Angles, reshaped by the Danish occupation and preserved by the relative isolation that flat, marshy land encourages. It is recognisably different from Norfolk, its nearest relative: Norfolk drops the “y” sound before certain vowels (“coot” for “cute”), while Suffolk generally does not. A phonetician writing in 1889 described the “Suffolk whine” — a rising intonation at the end of statements that sounds, to the outside ear, like perpetual questioning. Linguists now connect this feature to Scandinavian languages; the Danes who settled East Anglia left marks on how people speak as well as what they eat. The most characteristic grammatical habit is known as third-person zero marking: the -s ending drops in the third person singular. “She go to town.” “That rain all morning.” This sounds wrong to an outsider and perfectly correct to anyone who grew up here.
Place Names
Where the county keeps some of its better stories.
The legend of the Green Children of Woolpit, recorded by two twelfth-century chroniclers, holds that during the reign of King Stephen, two children were found wandering near the wolf pits at Woolpit. They had green-tinged skin and spoke an unknown language. They would eat nothing but raw beans. The boy died. The girl survived, learned English, lost her green colour as her diet broadened, and eventually entered service in a local household. She later said she came from “St Martin’s Land,” where it was always twilight. Nobody has satisfactorily explained this. The village sign at Woolpit features the green children. The wool is mentioned, but they are more interesting than the wool.
At the Table
What Suffolk produces, and how it has thought about sausages since 1881.
Suffolk has been serious about its pork for a very long time. The county’s free-range pig-farming tradition runs deep, and its products reflect this: Suffolk ham — dark, smoky, and salt-cured — is distinct from the pale pink hams sold elsewhere. Suffolk farmhouse cheese is now made at Creeting St Mary; there is a Suffolk Blue and a Suffolk Gold, both recently revived from near extinction. What follows are the things most worth knowing about.
The Newmarket Sausage — Protected since 2012
Two rival family butchers in Newmarket — Musk’s (est. 1884) and Powters (est. 1881) — have made the Newmarket sausage according to their respective secret recipes for over a century, the central dispute being whether to use bread or rusk as filler. Both recipes share the essential seasonings: black and white pepper, nutmeg, thyme, parsley, salt. Royal Warrants have been issued to Musk’s since 1907 — from George V, from the Duke of Windsor, from the Queen Mother, and from Queen Elizabeth II. In 2012 the Newmarket sausage was awarded Protected Geographical Indicator of Origin status, placing it in the company of Champagne, Parma ham, and Melton Mowbray pork pies. The EU, when it tried in 2005 to persuade the two firms to merge their recipes into a single protected version, was politely declined.
The two firms are separated by a few streets in Newmarket. Both still make their sausages fresh in small batches. Neither will say which recipe is older.
Ipswich Almond Pudding — since the 1740s
Made from cream, breadcrumbs, ground almonds, eggs, sugar, and a few drops of rosewater or orange-flower water, then baked in a slow oven until risen and golden: this pudding appears in cookery books from the mid-eighteenth century onward and was apparently well enough known to be called by the town’s name. The “true” proportions were a closely guarded secret within families — no definitive version exists — and the pudding nearly vanished from general knowledge before local historians began rescuing it. Someone in Ipswich once said, upon being shown the recipe in a history book: “I grew up here for forty years and I’ve never heard of this pudding.” This seems about right. It is not easy to find, and it is very good.
Adnams Brewery at Southwold has been brewing since 1872 and delivers its beer, in a pleasing tradition, by horse-drawn dray in the town centre. The brewery sits within the town itself, and the smell of malt is part of Southwold on brewing days. Their flagship bitter, Southwold Bitter, has been made to the same recipe since 1967. Branston Pickle, though invented in Staffordshire in 1922, is now mixed and bottled in Bury St Edmunds, where it has been made since the late twentieth century. The recipe, the manufacturers say, has not changed.
Signs & Songs
What Suffolk put into writing when it thought nobody was making note.
George Crabbe, the Aldeburgh poet, spent his life making notes. He had grown up watching Suffolk fishermen, farm labourers, and the county’s poor in circumstances that the pastoral fashion of the time preferred to sentimentalise. He declined. The Village, published in 1783, began with a direct challenge to the prevailing literary taste for gentle rural scenes:
Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o’er,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its wither’d ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o’er the land and rob the blighted rye.
— George Crabbe, The Village, Book I, 1783
Dr Johnson said it was the finest poem of its kind. Benjamin Britten, born in Lowestoft and devoted to Aldeburgh, set Crabbe’s The Borough as the opera Peter Grimes in 1945. Neither work is comforting. They are from the same coastline.
Jane Taylor of Lavenham wrote “The Star” in 1806, in the collection Rhymes for the Nursery. It begins as follows and will be recognisable even to people who have never heard of Lavenham:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
— Jane Taylor, “The Star,” Rhymes for the Nursery, Lavenham, 1806
It is one of the most widely translated poems in the world. Lewis Carroll parodied it. It has been set to the same French air for over two centuries. Lavenham does not make a great deal of this.
On this daye, the 4th of August, 1577, a straunge and terrible wunder wrought in this parish churche of Bungaye. A great darkness came with thunderclap. And herevpon, immediatlye the people in the same place were sore troubled & dismaied. A black dog appeared, and running along the bodye of the church with greate swiftnesse and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible forme and shape, passed betweene two persons, as they were kneelinge and praienge their neckes being wrung sutenly about — they strangely dyed.
The scorch marks left on the north door of Holy Trinity Church at Blythburgh, which Black Shuck visited the same afternoon, are still visible. The church is known locally as the Cathedral of the Marshes.
Did You Know?
A selection of facts which may surprise you, make you feel that history is closer than it appears, or cause you to think differently about sausages.
- That George Orwell — whose real name was Eric Blair — took his pen name partly from the River Orwell in Suffolk? He chose the river because he loved it, and George because it is the patron saint of England. He adopted the name so that his family would not be embarrassed by his accounts of poverty, which appeared first in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).
- That the first operational radar station in the world was at Bawdsey, on the Suffolk coast? It was developed there in utmost secrecy in 1937, gave the RAF the warning margin it needed to win the Battle of Britain in 1940, and remained so classified that most of the local population had no idea what was happening inside the requisitioned manor house.
- That the Sutton Hoo ship burial — the most significant Anglo-Saxon archaeological discovery in England — contained no identifiable human remains? The acid Suffolk soil dissolved everything organic over fourteen centuries. What survived was the impression of a body in the soil, a king’s worth of gold and silver treasure, and an iron helmet that has become one of the most reproduced images in British archaeology.
- That Dunwich returned two Members of Parliament to Westminster until 1832, despite having been mostly underwater for four hundred years? At the point of abolition under the Reform Act, the constituency had more fish than voters.
- That Martha’s Vineyard — the island off Massachusetts now best known for expensive summer holidays — was named by a Suffolk man after his dead Suffolk daughter? Bartholomew Gosnold of Otley Hall named it in 1602 after his infant Martha, who had died in Bury St Edmunds. She was probably two years old.
- That “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” was written in Lavenham, in 1806, by Jane Taylor? It is one of the most widely known poems in the English language. Taylor also wrote “I love little pussy,” which is less widely known but equally Lavenham.
- That the Pashford Pot Beetle — a tiny insect named for its habit of constructing small clay pots to live in — was known to exist only at Pashford Poor’s Fen, Lakenheath, in the whole of the world? It has not been seen since 2002. It is listed as a missing species. Nobody is quite sure what happened.
- That Thomas Cavendish’s circumnavigation of the globe, in 1586–88, was nine months faster than Drake’s? He completed it in 780 days, sailed into Plymouth with damask sails, fed Queen Elizabeth dinner aboard the Desire, and then spent all the money. He died at sea on his second attempt, aged 31.
- That the head of Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, is still kept in the Church of St Gregory, Sudbury? He was beheaded during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the severed head placed on a pike outside the Tower of London. It was eventually returned to his hometown, where it can still be visited, though few visitors expect it.
- That the largest container port in the United Kingdom is at Felixstowe, in Suffolk? It handles approximately four million containers per year, more than any other UK port. The town itself is a modest seaside resort with a Martello tower and a good municipal floral display. The juxtaposition is particular.
- That Branston Pickle — the dark, chunky condiment sold throughout the UK and inseparable from the ploughman’s lunch — is made in Bury St Edmunds? It was invented in Staffordshire in 1922, but has been produced in Suffolk since the late twentieth century, to the same secret recipe.
- That the village of Bures sits in both Suffolk and Essex simultaneously? The River Stour divides it: one side is Bures St Mary (Suffolk), the other Bures Hamlet (Essex). The Essex side is now the larger. The Suffolk side is older and, naturally, considers this the Essex side’s problem.
- That Edward FitzGerald spent most of his adult life within a few miles of where he was born, rarely leaving Suffolk for more than a week, and produced from his garden cottage near Woodbridge one of the most quoted poems in the English language — which sold for a penny at a bookstall before anyone noticed it?
- That in 1877, a team from Haughley and a team from Great Finborough raced each year to deliver a tenancy contract to the Chestnut Horse pub on Easter Monday — a tradition that marked the agricultural year? The tradition was lost in the First World War, then rediscovered in the 1990s when a farmer found the original contract in a drawer. It has been run every Easter Monday since. The pub still stands.
- That the Suffolk word teetertorter for a seesaw was carried to New England by Suffolk emigrants in the seventeenth century, where it became the standard American English “teeter-totter”? The word has nearly vanished in Suffolk itself. It lives on in Massachusetts, which has this in common with quite a lot of Suffolk vocabulary.
This page draws on local histories, dialect studies, and published accounts including: Suffolk Strange But True by Robert Halliday; Charlie Haylock’s dialect writings and radio work; the Public Domain Review’s essay on Dunwich by Matthew Green; parish records and county surveys; the Australian Dictionary of Biography (Margaret Catchpole); the World History Encyclopedia (Thomas Cavendish); Preservation Virginia (Bartholomew Gosnold); and various editions of the East Anglian Daily Times and Suffolk News. The selection, arrangement, and editorial commentary are Spaceless’s own. All errors of emphasis are ours; the genuine curiosities belong to Suffolk.