By Janet Harber

A wander across the Deben flood meadows near Wickham Market – OS Explorer Map 212 Woodbridge and Saxmundham

In October Judy and I investigated a three-and-a-half-mile circular walk from Wickham Market, around the Deben valley. It is one of three interesting local routes to be found on the visitwickhammarket.co.uk website. The two others we had walked previously but most of The Mill Route was new to us. We left our cars in the Wickham Market Crafters Car Park, entrance between two shops on the south side of the Market Place; there are toilets and you can pay by RinGo or cash.

The Peninsula is imbued with a sense of otherworldliness, bounded as it would be by water—the Ore/Alde to the north, the Deben at its southern boundary, and to the east the shingled, windy shores of the North Sea. On leaving the larger towns and villages, you enter a landscape peppered with villages and rural hamlets. Vast fields of sand-friendly crops give way to thick forests, heathlands and marshes. Ever smaller, sharply cornered roads meander through the landscape, lanes disappear into dead-ends, farmsteads, rivers. Its sparsely populated communities holding tight to their identity. In years gone, by each would have been fiercely independent, self-sufficient. A philosophy that I am sure remains today, despite the in-comers and inevitable supermarket vans.