Читать книгу Suffolk Coast and Heath Walks. 3 long-distance routes in the AONB: the Suffolk Coast Path, the Stour and Orwell Walk and the Sandlings Walk онлайн

6 страница из 41

The Suffolk Coast & Heaths AONB challenges many common preconceptions about Britain’s coast. While the coastal towns of Felixstowe, Aldeburgh and Southwold provide a taste of the traditional British seaside at its best, much of the area confounds conventional thinking about beauty, and challenges notions of a permanent coast ‘line’. This is a soft coast, shaped and continually re-formed by the capricious whim of the cold North Sea. It’s a sea that is constantly nibbling away at the land, making no distinction between the area’s sandy cliffs and small coastal towns, and causing some of the highest rates of erosion in Britain. But it’s not all about loss – in other places the sea is building new landscapes and creating some of the most extraordinary coastal features in Britain, such as the shingle spit of Orford Ness.

Behind the coast lies a remarkable area of heathland known as the Sandlings. The Sandlings once covered a vast area of east Suffolk, stretching along the coast from Lowestoft to the edge of Ipswich. The surviving remnants of these heaths are not as wholly natural as they appear, but are a product of the way people have used the land over hundreds, or even thousands, of years – a response to the arid sandy soils of the area. This human influence created an open heathy landscape that became home for plants and animals that would previously have lived only in small woodland clearings. It also established a way of life, based on sheep farming, that whole communities would come to depend on – one that would continue virtually unchanged until swept away in the 20th century by modern agricultural practice.