Shingle Street – Final

Shingle Street from the south, July 2012

Shingle Street is made up of a massive undulating spinal shingle bank, which runs for a mile and a half from Orford Haven in the north to a Martello tower and Bawdsey Beach in the south, and the eponymous hamlet strung out along the road.   On the east it is washed by the North Sea; to the west the pastures of the Oxley Marshes stretch inland to Hollesley.  This is not the sandy seaside of East Anglian bucket and spade holidays: it’s a place of stones, of hardness and austerity.

I visited Shingle Street first in July 2012 and the last time was in December 2021.  I made nine visits in all and these have variously been the subject of over 30 posts on this blog.  My experiences of the place have now been set down in a book structured around diary entries and photographs from the nine visits.  On the visits and through the book I have tried to find Shingle Street’s sense of place.

Shingle Street lends itself to solitary contemplation, it’s a place of the mind  Crowds, happy holidaymakers, don’t gather on the stony shore, it’s a place for roaming figures – the wind off the German Ocean blows them across the shingle like human spindrift.  It’s a landscape with a Spartan air and muted palette that shun intimacy.  The somber weather brings out its character: heavy skies; bodies hunched against the wind; and the cautionary sound of the sea as waves beat up the shore and shift shingle in a gravelly roar as they spend their energy.  There is a special quality to the morning on overcast days – perhaps due to the reflective qualities of the sea and shingle  – that translates into a world of rich textures and tones that are sometimes dramatic sometimes subtle.  It’s a place of ever changing land, sea, sound and sky.

Percolation lagoon, October 2020

What I understood of Shingle Street deepened with each visit.  Do I understand myself better as a result?  Perhaps.  Shingle bank and hamlet have stored up shifting, fragmented memories of what they used to be: they remind me that memories also are at best partial and often unreliable.  They are that way because life is imperfect, impermanent and entangled.  Each visit offered time to think, to be in the moment, and to form new memories to keep alongside the mutable old ones. Stepping out meant also stepping in.  The sounds of the waves in all their moods – lapping, surging, beating – washed away other noises.

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4 Responses to Shingle Street – Final

  1. Roy says:

    Really looking forward to seeing this Brian, just wish I’d managed more than two visits to complete my view of the place. Maybe this year…

  2. Roy says:

    Forgot to mention – ‘December 2022’? – the time-travelling photographer!

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