Walking the edge of Southwold: the almost-island circuit

Southwold is very nearly an island, and the best way to understand the town is to walk its boundary. The sea is on the east. The River Blyth curls round the south to the harbour. Buss Creek runs across the north. That leaves one neck of land at Mights Bridge, and for centuries a bridge there was the only way out to Reydon and the rest of Suffolk. A local benefactor, Emma Lord, left money for a permanent bridge in 1524.

The circuit is about 7km and takes two to two and a half hours at a normal pace with stops. It is flat throughout, the only rise being the low cliff at Gun Hill. The surfaces change constantly: promenade, made path, shingle harbour track, grazing marsh. In winter the marsh section is genuinely wet, so boots. In summer the seafront leg has no shelter at all.

Start at the pier

Begin at Southwold Pier on North Parade, because it is where the biggest car park is and because it is the town at its most straightforwardly seaside. The deck runs 623 feet out into the North Sea and walking it costs nothing. Under it is the Under the Pier Show, Tim Hunkin's arcade of home-made coin-operated machines, which is not a museum of old slot machines but a working collection of new ones about walking the dog and going to the gym. If the wind is up, that part will be shut; the pier closes its indoor attractions in high winds and posts a notice.

South along the promenade

Turn south and the beach huts start. They run almost unbroken along the front, each one a different colour, most with a name on the gable. They are private property and they change hands for sums that get into the national papers, so the walking is on the promenade in front of them rather than among them. Sand over shingle below, timber groynes running out into the water.

About halfway along, on East Cliff, there is a plain red brick building with a flagstaff beside it. This is the Sailors' Reading Room, built in 1864 as a refuge for fishermen and mariners when they were not at sea, founded with the explicit aim of keeping them out of the pubs. It is open 9am to 5pm every day except Christmas Day and Boxing Day, it costs nothing, and inside it is crowded with portraits of local fishermen, seascapes and ship models. Twenty minutes here is the best twenty minutes on the walk.

Gun Hill

The promenade climbs gently to the clifftop green at the southern end. Six eighteen-pounder guns stand in a line pointing out over the water, which is why it is called Gun Hill. The bay in front of them is Sole Bay, where an Anglo-French fleet fought a Dutch fleet on 28 May 1672 within sight of the town; by the museum's account nearly four thousand seamen died, and cannonballs still come up in fishing nets off this coast. The guns were taken away and buried in the Second World War and put back on new carriages afterwards.

Behind the guns is one of the greens that give Southwold its shape. They are not decoration. After the fire of 1659 destroyed most of the town in four hours, the rebuilt street plan put open ground between the blocks as firebreaks. That is why a town of under a thousand people has so much grass inside it.

Down to the harbour

Leave the cliff by Ferry Road and follow it down to Blackshore on the north bank of the Blyth. The change of register is abrupt and it is the best thing about the walk: black tarred fishing huts, boats up on the hard, crates and nets and a working quay. The Sole Bay Fish Company counter is here, landing from its own boats. So is the Harbour Inn, right on the water, first come first served, which is the natural halfway stop.

At the very end of Ferry Road is the slipway for the Walberswick ferry, a wooden boat rowed by hand across the river mouth. It is worth walking down to whether or not you cross; the crossing takes a couple of minutes and saves a road detour of about 13km round by Blythburgh. It runs daily 10am to 5pm from 30 March to 1 November, weekends only outside that, cash only, and not at all in rough weather.

Inland, and back along the creek

From the Harbour Inn keep the river on your left and follow the north bank upstream past the sluice to the footbridge over the Blyth. Turn back east across the Town Marshes and the Common, grazing land rather than parkland, with Buss Creek and its reedbeds ahead. There is an interpretation board on the creek explaining the brackish water and the birds it feeds: sedge and reed warblers, reed buntings, grasshopper warblers, water rails. In April and May the reeds are loud and almost nobody is here.

The path brings you back to Mights Bridge and the road into town. Blyth Road, and the Southwold Railway Trust's Steamworks, are a short detour from here if it is an open Sunday. Otherwise turn for the High Street and the pier, and the loop closes.