Located between an old fort and the harbour viewing zone, where beautiful views span across the waterway to Essex. Delightful scenery everywhere, but not what most people want to witness. They come for the hustle and bustle of the dock and the fishermen selling their catch of the day.
In the natural curvature, I turned left, following the signs of a public footpath. This section is a pitiable justification for a track. My jeans deteriorated with the moisture from the long blades, obscured by trees, functioning as a windbreak to some meadows. In the remoteness, small lights indicate a farm.
To my right, empty stretches of muck where the briny appeared, ascending like a wall under the gloomy sky.
About fifty metres away a broad timbered pontoon, illuminated by sporadic, positioned dim streetlamps.
Past the wharf, a cluster of houseboats experienced better days. Some small, with square compartments and round the wheels at the back, and some immense. The majority, no longer lived in, swung from their moorings. A few stood lit. Diehards loved the solitude, no matter what the weather.
Only an elite group. The hippies and artists long gone, the coating peeled from the rusting, blistered hulls. The gangways collapsed as the abandoned vessels listing from their anchorages on the green-grey soil on which they perched. Years of rain and wind blasted through the cabins.
Vandals done the rest, thrown stones through the windows, torn off steering-wheels and ripped out seats, beds, and tables, painted graffiti on the soiled deck, tipped rubbish into the holds. The sight of this abandonment gave me shivers.
A woman emerged, looking like she only got out of bed. Her long greying hair tied up, but in her haste, she missed some strands which enhanced an appearance. About ten years younger than me, she still retained an enticement about here, not taking much imagination to imagine in earlier years she would break many hearts.
Her cabin gathered winter flowers in pots, a chair, and table, and a variation of colours, and a gangplank extending from the quayside. To complete the homeliness, a post-box.
"Hello."
"Morning."
"Out for a walk?"
"Yes. I'm trying to search out the lie of the land."
"Oh! Not from around here?"
"No, London, for my sins."
She smiled. "Long way from home, like my neighbours."
She gestured to the boathouse two down.
"Where they come from?"
"Not seen them, overheard them. They argued last night, not in English."
My curiosity spiked.
"They sounded Japanese or Russian. Not sure which."
I took a few steps closer.
"The smaller one."
This one would only be reached by climbing over a larger boat near the shore; in its better days, bottle-green. In the clinging haze, small scabs of paint flaking from its side, visible, and the trapdoor leading to the compartment ripped from its hinges, no sign of life.
I bid my farewell and walked for an hour past the boatyard with the stilted walkways over the tributary sludge, out on the raised passage in the destination of the swamp.
I stood at the place where the tidewater creek merged with the inland water mass and the slow-swaying reed bogs. The silence, broken only when I disturbed a swan clattering away.
I took the trail beside the course of the old river, now silted and slender, and across the northerly edge of the marsh. I climbed, sliding, over the vast collection of boulders the tide threw up and went down on to the beach. My feet gouged in the grit, saturated from the diminishing stream.
The sun tried its utmost to pierce the mist, and the only sound, the hissing of the shingle.
I stood for a moment, noticing boats floated unhindered at their buoys. Through the fine gauze of the fog, I formed the shapes of stocky, reinforced pillboxes. Built as a defence during the Second World War.
Soldiers would hide inside and poke their rifles out of the narrow slits to prevent the Nazis from coming ashore on the Suffolk coast. All the effort, so much concrete, but the Germans never came, and here they still waited, cracked, immovable, half-toppled on the seashore.
After a while, I turned right and followed the way straight to the sea. In the end, a place where children must come in the heat to swing from ropes, play football and golf. Now deserted, as well, with a padlocked green wooden hut. A cat rested on the step and peered at me. A couple of seagulls stalked encircling the bins, steadying themselves in the breeze with their huge wings.
I decided to walk along the reef.
The trackway narrowed and opened up on a coarse parking area. Hard to believe in the summer, the problems reaching the place from the road about impossible, but now only two parked cars.
I walked through the sparse greenery, guiding to the fortification. The tidal surge, still receding, sand, and clay. I stood on the point, the easternmost tip of this stretch, and a mile to the north and as far in the other direction.
The route disappeared from view around the gentle curve of the wall. Only one figure, a cockle-picker, on the sands. South-west, nobody. A small crane rested in the distance, where the barricade continued under repair, but remained still and unused over the weekend.
From here, became impractical to proceed further without coming across some tracks which led into the yards of the principal farms on this part of the coastline. The slope of the shoreline, facing the shingle-spit, is much less accessible than the south. Arable fields dampened and dissolved into marshland, reeds, and disused oyster brackish habitats.
On my left, a ditch and wind some small, scrubby bushes, twisted by surviving years off the ocean.
Beyond them, rough grass, like seaweed, dipped down and steered towards the dirt of the estuary. On the right a hedgerow, and some trees marking the boundary of a field, ploughed, appearing like a frozen brown stormy abyss.
Many things remain littered on an empty pathway when walking along. The remnants of damp leaves from the autumn, a cigarette packet, beer bottles, a torn-shopping bag, a soggy tissue, a sodden newspaper, a polystyrene container with some unrecognizable traces of takeaway food.
After the pandemic, the amount of detritus left dumped about the countryside worsened, rather than getting better.
Which I thought odd.
Why so much rubbish lay about when not so many people went out?
I kept on walking. The day deepened. The light changed and thickened. The ebb and flow coming in.
Something caught my eye.
In the grey came a streak of white, amidst the foam erupted, with the tremendous speed, an oval steel structure. Water cascaded down in sheets. In minutes, the turret on the body of a submarine glided toward the pier. The motor made no sound, water sprayed off its jet-black exterior and whirling white.
The shape of the descending plane slashed vertical through the conning tower, and the tail steerage at the back, like nothing I experienced before. A conventional engine would make more noise.
Like a three-storey building rising from the swells, three hundred feet long and windowless. A tin can of people and technology, nuclear-powered and armed. I shivered. I never thought a machine emanated foreboding, but this did. As dark and as cold as the water lapping around them.
One moment nothing, and in front of me, ploughing through the swell approaching the jetty. The vessel possessed no markings, but not British.
Afterwards, like a giant Leviathan, slipped beneath the waves comparable to a mythical creature.