Help me sort out St Peter's!: Southwold and Dunwich.

Friday 25 September 2015

Southwold and Dunwich.

We knew it was going to be a sunny day and we got up early to enjoy it - we went on a road trip to East Anglia or at least the bottom bit of it.

We had loads of hold ups on the M25 and we even passed a burnt out car transporter on the opposite side of the road with a traffic jam going back for miles. When we got home I heard that people were held up for up to six hours.....we missed it.

Phew!

I got all the way up to Southwold on half a tank of petrol but I hadn't bargained on this little town not having a petrol station.

Here's the old lighthouse;

There's a long line of Napoleonic war cannons pointing out to sea bravely but they aren't as courageous as they look.

When the First World War broke out the town got so scared that they would be fired on that they hid them!

It was a nice morning - Robyn did 'One Footed Paddling';

You can see the Pier on the skyline.

And what skies - this is The North Sea.

Big, Big Skies and a Northern Light which gives it a special look that just goes on forever;

We looked for Seashells and Seaglass but King Neptune was keeping a tight hold on his treasure.

We went on the Pier;

It has distorting mirrors, a water clock and lots of quirky artwork;

There were satirical amusements;

Southwold got very fashionable a few years ago and very expensive too. Even the beach huts can reach six figure sums;

Some of them are decorated;

The town has a long seafaring history, there are ships figureheads like this one on a house;

This is 'Idun House', named after a 19th century shipwreck;

When we left I had about a breathful of petrol left in the tank. Just a sigh, really.

I got directions but they didn't get me to a petrol station so I headed for the main road and drove rather slowly.

I crawled - I didn't fancy running out in the middle of nowhere.

We were lucky, after driving forever through empty countryside we found some petrol just as the needle was scraping along the bottom of the tank.

We headed down to Dunwich which was once a prosperous port but some great storms in the 14th century swept the town (built on sand) away.

Now there's a pub, a café and a few fishing huts by the sea;

We walked along the shoreline, beachcombing and messing about.

On the horizon you can just make out Sizewell 'B' nuclear power station. This was the subject of a big public campaign against extension of nuclear power generation in the early 1980's and I am sorry to say that we lost.

The Conservatives and the nuclear industry fought a very dirty fight against us in the long running public enquiry; they fiddled the figures to minimise the costs of building, running and decommissioning nuclear power stations.

Future generations will pay a huge cost for our failure to prevent the building of this money pit.

Ironically, out to sea we saw a giant new wind farm.