a quiet edge of england

I’m in England for the first time in a couple of years. I had only planned to spend a few weeks here visiting family, but then the corona virus swept its way across Europe and my plans, like everyone else’s, changed. 

Suffolk, on the east coast of England, is only a couple of hours from London by train, but it feels a world away. Here you can find the last lingering remnants of that English idyll where village traditions follow the seasons. It’s a land of farms, scattered woodlands and slow WiFi. At different stages of my life its remoteness has felt like both a prison and a refuge. Now it’s a combination of both. 

During most of February and early March I spent hours sitting at my laptop, refreshing maps tracking the spread of the virus and calling friends in other parts of the world to compare the situation. Almost all of them were in the same predicament as me, stuck at home and waiting for normality to resume. I video called my girlfriend and she said, “It feels like I’m waiting for you to come back from a war.” 

I laughed and told her, “It’s a very boring war.”

But for a lot of us it’s true that so far this ‘war’ has been defined by an underlying unease and anxiety as we brace for an invisible wave that we know is coming and have little control over.   

As March continues winter eases into spring and better weather. I take the dog for long walks across the open countryside and begin to rediscover this quiet edge of England. There’s not much breath-taking about the Suffolk landscape. There are no spectacular mountains or waterfalls. Instead the beauty here is mostly subtle and undemanding of attention, in a way that I realise makes me love it all the more. A herd of deer on a distant field. Ancient twisted oak trees creaking in the wind. Waves of the North Sea lapping softly against the beaches. The ghostly shape of a barn owl at dusk. A gentle wildness.

My parents get the local newspaper each morning and between the headlines about the coronavirus there are smaller articles, often about Suffolk’s vanishing coastline. The county has always been badly effected by coastal erosion and over centuries in certain places has literally disappeared into the sea. 

During my newly found free time I visit some of these places, defined by what has is no longer there. Dunwich, which in the Middle Ages was a bustling international port, is now a small village with a few eerie ruins of a friary it’s cliff edge. The rest of the old town, including eight churches, has been long lost to the sea and is the subject of folktales and songs: 

“By the lost town of Dunwich

The shore was washed away

They say you hear the church bells still

As they toll beneath the waves”

The coast at Covehithe also has one of the highest rates of erosion in the whole of the UK. Fallen trees scatter the beach, one road simply drops away from the cliffs, and only a cluster of houses remain. But it’s also a great spot to walk and look for sea glass, twinkling like gem stones on the beach. 

The church at Covehithe is a rare oddity. It sits within the ruined walls of a larger medieval church. On the overcast day I visit, the place is eerily quiet and ghostly. Walking around this half destroyed structure, and with the sound of the nearby sea in my ears, it’s difficult not to think about the impermanence of our ways of living. Maybe it’s because everything suddenly seems so fragile these days.

And perhaps for the first time I feel very lucky to have this place at all, even if it won’t be here forever. What I’m feeling is probably familiar to anyone like me who has grown up knowing only one home. A place to return to, and keep returning, to gather thoughts, and take shelter in troubling times. 

This article was originally published at Elsewhere: A Journal of Place