Shingle Street Walk

 

Today was day 12 of Joyce's Mini Waking Festival and this was my contribution to the festival, a 12 mile walk from Shingle Street on the coast - a walk I had done with Ann in November (which you can read about here). The weather forecast wasn't great...

I asked everyone who had said they wanted to do it if they still wanted to go ahead and everyone said yes. I even had several options for shortening the walk but in the end we walked the full 12 mile distance. It was certainly windy but nobody got blown off the path.

Our route started at Shingle Street and followed the Suffolk Coast Path to the end of Boyton Marshes before returning inland via Boyton and Hollesley before a loop around Shingle Street to finish with... well you'll see.

This was the route...

Here are a few of my photos.

I arrived early at the Coastguard's cottages, but on the way I had to go under a fallen tree, which a policeman was investigating. Shortly afterwards the road was closed for the tree to be removed and everyone else arrived at once, wondering how I had got there ahead of them.

We were all wrapped up warm for the wind.

The tide was out as we followed the creek inland to the multi-coloured bridge to cross it.

Looking back at where we had come from, the cottages were now the sole sign of human habitation on the horizon. We had a couple of showers, but the wind was so strong they soon blew over.

We passed a pillbox on the Hollesley Marshes. The sign there told us that between July and September 1940, 55th Division Engineers supervised the construction of 633 of them in Suffolk.

As we progressed along the coast, the strange structures on Orford Ness came into view. The odd pagoda-shaped buildings were actually test laboratories for the atom bomb during the cold war. There is a really good description of the place here. Sadly, the iconic red and white striped lighthouse is no more as it was demolished (see here and  here) before it could fall in the sea in July/August 2020.

We also had views of Orford village and could see both the castle and church.

At Flybury point the path turned inland.

This building made a welcome rest point for a drink as we could shelter from the wind round the other side.

We left the coast path and made for Boyton. We saw this sign at the farm at the end of the road. We were OK as we weren't walking faster than 5 mph and we checked we could stop.

We had our lunch stop at Boyton Village Hall, which had seating for all.outside.

We went by the outside of the Youth Custody Centre.

Entering the grounds of the Suffolk Punch Trust, we spotted a muntjac deer...

...and a couple of pigs...

...as well as some lovely horses.

We passed All Saints, Holleseley church, but didn't stop to visit, before heading back into the country along the quiet roads back towards Shingle Street,

We went past Dumb Boy Cottage where, according to this leaflet, smugglers could leave messages without fear of betrayal.

Just a few yards further along the road we came to where the fallen tree had been removed.

We did a loop along the creek behind Shingle Street.

We had one last shower as we did. This one was out to sea soon enough.

We entered the village from the south via the Martello tower...

..and walked along the beach...

...to this rather lovely decorated trail of shells goes from one of the coastguard cottages down to the sea. It was begun in 2005 by two dutch ladies who were childhood friends and had been diagnosed with breast cancer within a couple of months of each other. They came here to reflect on their treatment and started it as a symbol of friendship. They both  suffered a long battle with cancer but were eventually cured. The line now stretches for more than 275m and is made up of 20,000 individual whelk shells. Read more about it here.

Now it was just a short work back to our cars.

Well that was something. Those winds were ferocious at times. It would have been nicer if it was calm and sunny, but we were all glad we stuck it out. Thank-you to Ann, Julian, Peter, Roland and Teresa for doing the endurance test with me!

You can see more details of our walk here on MapMyWalk and more of my photos here on Flickr.