a day ago
I followed in the footsteps of Sebald to see how Suffolk has changed in 30 years
'How long would it take to walk the Rings of Saturn?' I asked ChatGPT. 'About 17.2 years,' came the reply. 'You'd have to leap between icy particles flying at high speed.' I giggled.
'The book, I mean.' A few days, depending how much time I spent 'engaging deeply with the landscape and history of Suffolk,' it deduced.
W. G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, a hybrid travelogue, memoir, hauntology and history novel, was published 30 years ago. The unnamed narrator, thought to be Sebald, a Bavarian native who lived in East Anglia for three decades until his untimely death in 2001, walked south through Suffolk in a meditative mood.
The landscape triggers tangential passages on everything from local writers to the Holocaust and silkworms, with a recurring theme of places and empires in decline.
I'd travel the same coastal route, with Sebald's lyrical, wandering sentences for company. The narrator sets off in August 1992, 'when the dog days were drawing to an end'. I strapped on my backpack in early summer.
I disembarked at tiny Somerleyton station. I didn't hop over a back wall, as Sebald had done, to visit Somerleyton Hall & Gardens, reworked from its Jacobean Manor footprint by Sir Samuel Morton Peto, whose company had built the 19th-century Houses of Parliament.
All that remains of the domed glass, fountain and fernery of the exquisite Winter Gardens, demolished in 1914, is a dream-like conservatory echoing Sebald's line that 'those who visited were barely able to tell where the natural ended and the man-made began'.
It was Morton Peto who also built the railway from Norwich to Lowestoft, my next stop, and created the seaside villas of the town that helped boost its attraction as a holiday resort. Sebald was disheartened as he walked into Lowestoft, hobbled as it was by the decline of the fishing industry.
Lately, however, new life has been breathed into the town, thanks to the arrival of the First Light Festival, now in its fifth year, and a clutch of creative foodie, arty and cultural spots.
In a nod to both local history and Sebald's book, I hungered after kippers, but Lowestoft's Atlantic Fish Bar only did battered hunks of cod and haddock. An audacious gull waddled in and out in search of fallen chips.
It wasn't until I reached the Joseph Conrad, a Wetherspoon's pub, that I found a reference to the former source of the town's wealth: a photo, on a wall, of 'herring girls' gutting fish.
In 1913, 12 million 'silver darlings' were landed in the town and at nearby Great Yarmouth in three months. Both Conrad, who first set foot on English soil when he arrived in Lowestoft in 1878, and herrings, are Rings of Saturn digressions.
The following morning, I set off south – the same direction as herring move in the North Sea on their way to spawn – under a colossal sky of painterly clouds recently relieved of their rain. The sea changed from chocolate to milky blue as the sun pushed through.
The cliffs at Kessingland, frothing with yellow lupine, buttercups and alexanders – with their mildly peppery perfume, rise 16 metres above the shore. I stood on sabre-toothed cats and steppe mammoth remains, from when Doggerland curled up close to the fjords of Norway, before sinking beneath the waves.
Beside a holiday park, I glimpsed a tilted pillbox dressed in a skirt of marram grass. Suffolk's coast, vulnerable during the Second World War, was heavily fortified, and Sebald weaves the militarisation of the shoreline throughout his book.
After passing the Hundred River, I find another pillbox, dislodged and licked by the sea. I watched sand martins dart into their nesting holes in cliffs the colour of ginger biscuits. 'I was [...] standing on perforated ground,' Sebald wrote, 'which might have given way at any moment.'
This coast is indeed disappearing. At nearby Covehithe, four to six metres – the height of a giraffe – are swallowed each year. Or 198 giraffes since Sebald stepped this way.
The ramble to Southwold, along the beach, was long, with very few people about. But footprints of dogs and walkers, and scattered cuttlebones, reminded me of life and death. I tacked past bleached branches and tree roots torn from their previous homes.
At the Southwold Sailors' Reading Room, another Sebald stop, I sunk into a wingback and dozed until the noise of gulls, the rustle of chips outside, and the click of snooker balls in the Members' Room roused me.
The Crown, where Sebald had paused, offered no newspapers, as in his day, though the Southwold Organ magazine pleaded to protest the 'National Grid Energy Onslaught' – a reference to the construction of Sizewell C nuclear power station and other projects.
After leaving Southwold, I reached a bridge, spanning the Blyth River, that was built for the narrow-gauge railway that once linked Southwold to Halesworth. Now a mere footbridge, it was busy with crabbers – nothing like Sebald's bleak scene. The theory that the railway's carriages had originally been built for the Emperor of China, mentioned in Rings of Saturn, seems to be a case of Chinese whispers.
Steel-grey clouds lowered over Walberswick as I arrived, and a drizzle descended as I strolled beside and over water, along reed and oak apple-strewn paths to Dunwich.
Dunwich was one of the most important ports in medieval Europe, until – in 1286 – a storm tide devastated it so terribly 'that for months afterwards no one could tell where the land ended and the sea began'.
As I read Sebald's spine-chilling account while looking towards where the town once lay, listening to the sea shushing against the shingle, I sensed the 'immense power of emptiness'. I steadied myself, later, in the bar of The Ship.
The delightful, 16th-century, half-timbered Bull Inn at Woodbridge still creaks, as Sebald noted. Rooms are adorned with prints of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald, who was born nearby, and whose life captured Sebald's interest.
Below Woodbridge the remote Bawdsey Peninsula stretches along the northern edge of the idyllic Deben estuary. Here, an 'Anglo-Indian fairy-tale palace in the dunes' peeps above the trees.
Bawdsey Manor is where the Air Ministry's 'death ray' idea emerged – eventually becoming radar technology. Radar helped win the Battle of Britain, a story now told at the nearby museum.
Sebald did not live to learn that Nasa used radar to explore the real rings of Saturn. Today, Bawdsey Manor is used by PGL for courses and children's holidays.
Up the coast is Shingle Street, where I crunched along and found a hotbed of unusual plants – sea pea, yellow horned poppy and the otherworldly mullein – colouring the beach gardens of the isolated homes. The German Ocean Mansions, mentioned by Sebald, remain, as does the Martello Tower, one of 29 rounded forts built on the east coast to repel a Napoleonic invasion.
When I arrived at Orford Castle, I climbed, like Sebald, to the top of the keep. From the roof of the keep, 90ft above an exceptionally pretty village, all roses and red brick, I saw the mingling of the Ore and the Alde rivers, and a horizon serrated by scattered angular buildings: Orford Ness.
Long after the Ministry of Defence abandoned it to tide and time in 1993, it remains a mysterious finger of flat land, even though it's been open to the public for 30 years.
The iconic 'pagodas' of the site were labs used to test vibration, temperature and the G force of nuclear weapons.
I gawped at the desiccating remains of Lab 1, built to withstand the testing of the UK's Blue Danube, the country's first nuclear bomb. A cold-to-the-touch warhead is on display in the Island of Secrets exhibition. Once a year the Atomic Weapons Establishment boat to the Ness to make sure the National Trust isn't tinkering in the shingle and making it live.
The Rings of Saturn are made from the fragments of a shattered moon which got too close to the planet. I'd begun my walk apprehensive of Sebald's splintered text and tangential spurs into his orbit of distant worlds, loss and haunting episodes in history.
But as I walked with Sebald, I realised there was nowhere I'd rather have been than getting lost in moments, meanders and landscapes than Suffolk's shape-shifting coast.
How to do it
