Scenic Place in Suffolk

RSPB Minsmere on the Suffolk coast is one of the most celebrated nature reserves in Britain, a site of exceptional biodiversity where a mosaic of habitats ranging from open sea to reed bed, lagoon, heathland and woodland creates conditions for an astonishing variety of wildlife within a compact area. It has been an RSPB reserve since 1947 and has become not just a conservation success story but a symbol of what can be achieved when natural habitats are protected and managed with skill and dedication. The reserve covers approximately 1,000 hectares and its different habitat zones function almost as distinct wildlife destinations within a single location. The coastal reedbed, one of the largest in Britain, provides nesting habitat for the elusive bittern, a bird that came close to extinction as a British breeding species and has made a remarkable comeback here and at other managed reserves. The booming call of the male bittern carries across the reed beds in late winter and spring, one of the most thrilling natural sounds in the British countryside. Marsh harriers quarter the reeds throughout the day, and Cetti's warblers produce their explosive song from dense vegetation along the water channels. The Scrape, an area of shallow lagoons with islands created by the RSPB specifically to provide nesting and feeding habitat, is famous as the site where avocets returned to breed in Britain after a century of absence in the 1940s. The avocet became the symbol of the RSPB and the story of its return to Minsmere remains one of the most resonant conservation success stories in British wildlife history. Today avocets nest in numbers at the Scrape and their elegant black-and-white forms are one of the guaranteed sights of a summer visit. The heathland section of the reserve provides habitat for nightjars, woodlarks and all six species of British reptile, while the woodland edges attract warblers, woodpeckers and butterflies throughout the spring and summer. Otters have been recorded along the water channels, and the offshore waters attract seabirds and, occasionally, offshore cetaceans. Minsmere is probably the best single location in Britain for seeing a wide variety of wildlife in a single day visit. Seven miles of accessible paths and ten hides, including wheelchair-accessible facilities, allow visitors to explore the reserve at a comfortable pace. The visitor centre provides excellent information about what to look for and where. Entry fees support the RSPB's wider conservation work.

Walberswick is one of the most appealing small villages on the Suffolk coast, a settlement of traditional timber-framed and brick cottages on the south bank of the River Blyth opposite Southwold whose combination of the beach, the river, the marshes and the character of an unspoiled coastal village creates one of the most rewarding and most atmospheric destinations on the East Anglian coast. The village is accessible by foot across the old iron bridge from Southwold or by ferry in summer, and its slightly detached position from the main holiday infrastructure preserves a quality of quiet that the more celebrated Southwold across the river cannot quite match. The beach at Walberswick, a broad expanse of sand and shingle extending south from the river mouth, provides excellent bathing and walking and the combination of the beach and the river mouth creates habitat for the terns, waders and wildfowl that make this section of the Suffolk coast one of the most rewarding for birdwatching. The Walberswick National Nature Reserve, encompassing the extensive reedbed and heath behind the beach, provides some of the finest reedbed birds on the Suffolk coast. The village green and the scattered cottages of the village centre, several converted fishermen's dwellings of considerable age, provide an architectural character that has attracted artists since Wilson Steer's celebrated plein air paintings of the beach in the 1880s and 1890s established Walberswick as an artists' colony. The tradition of artistic engagement with this coast continues and several galleries in the village reflect the sustained creative response to a landscape of great subtlety.

Lavenham in Suffolk is the finest and most completely preserved medieval wool town in England, a village of over three hundred timber-framed buildings whose market place, guildhall and main streets create a streetscape of medieval England at its most complete and most architecturally rich that has been used as the location for numerous period film and television productions. The combination of the extraordinary density of medieval buildings, the guildhall, the church and the market cross creates a heritage experience unlike any other available in East Anglia. The prosperity that produced Lavenham's medieval buildings came from the wool trade, the town being one of the principal centres of Suffolk broadcloth production in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries whose wealthy clothiers financed the buildings that survive today. The Church of St Peter and St Paul, built with the wealth of the wool trade in the Perpendicular Gothic style in the late fifteenth century, is one of the grandest parish churches in England, its tower rising 44 metres above the town in a display of merchant ambition and civic pride that reflects the extraordinary wealth of Lavenham at its commercial peak. The Guildhall of the seventeenth-century Corpus Christi Guild, managed by the National Trust, provides the finest single building for exploring the history of the town and the medieval guilds that organised its commercial and social life. The combination of the guildhall, the church and the surrounding streets of timber-framed buildings creates the complete medieval townscape experience.