Where to stay

Prices quoted are for a double room based on two people sharing (unless stated otherwise).

The Brudenell Hotel As close to the beach as you can get, the Brudenell has had a smart refurbishment, but the mood remains genteel. Eat on the terrace to absorb the huge sea vistas, and never mind the wind. From £140 including breakfast. The Parade, Aldeburgh IP15 5BU, 01728 452071, brudenellhotel.co.uk

The Crown A breezy New England makeover has turned this former drinkers’ pub into a stylish, relaxed restaurant with rooms in this friendly market town. From £125 including breakfast. Thoroughfare, Woodbridge IP12 1AD, 01394 384242, thecrownatwoodbridge.co.uk

The Crown and Castle Ruth Watson got her spot as a TV hotelier by keeping a great place herself. Comfy and laid-back with dog-friendly gardenrooms. From £125 including breakfast. Orford, Woodbridge IP12 2LJ 01394 450205, crownandcastle.co.uk

The Stables As well as the Latitude music festival, Henham Park is home to this small B&B in a converted red-brick house. Rooms have vaulted ceilings and oak beams, and walks on the estate are a big draw. From £80 including breakfast. Henham Park, Beccles NR34 8AN, 07939 566714, stablesathenhampark.com

The Swan East Anglia’s best-known hotel wears its 350 years of history lightly. It’s owned by Adnams, and the brewery is just across the courtyard – the hotel can arrange tours. From £135 including breakfast. Market Place, Southwold IP18 6EG, 01502 722186, adnams.co.uk

Travel Information

Suffolk remains one of England’s driest counties. The mean annual temperature for the region varies from just above 9°C to around 10°C. Temperature shows both seasonal and diurnal variations. January and February are the coldest months with the mean daily minimum temperature across the region close to 1°C. During the summer months, average temperatures range between 12°C and 23°C. Snow can be expected during December and January.

GETTING THERE

National Express coach services travels from London Liverpool Street to Ipswich or Lowestoft. Journey time is about two hours.

National Express East Anglia (nationalexpresseastanglia.com) has regular rail services between London Liverpool Street and Woodbridge or Saxmundham via Ipswich every day. Journey time is one hour 40 minutes. From Saxmundham, it is a short drive by car or (pre-booked) taxi to Southwold and Aldeburgh.

RESOURCES

Visit Suffolk (01473 406711, visitsuffolk.com) provides plenty of information about the region, including hidden walking and cycling routes, festivals, farmers markets and other ideas for a great day out in the county.

Food Safari (07966 475195, foodsafari.co.uk) specialises in gourmet food experiences in Suffolk. Go and discover all the luxury local produce available around the beautiful Suffolk countryside, and get an insight of the process and meaning of farm to fork.

FURTHER READING

Bradt Slow Norfolk & Suffolk by Laurence Mitchell (Bradt Travel Guides, £14.99). This book is packed with beautiful pictures and information on Suffolk’s history, walks and places to stay, as well as all the practical details you need for an easy, relaxing break. The author lets the reader in on all the well-known sights as well as off-the-beaten-track secrets in a personal tour that takes in the coast and villages, remote marshes, beaches and shingle banks of the area.

Where to eat

Prices quoted are the average cost for two people for three courses with half a bottle of wine.

The Anchor Fresh fish dominates the menu at this relaxed seaside pub. Sophie and Mark Dorber’s style of hospitality is very personal. She’s a great cook: ask Mark to match her signature warm almond, apple and toffee cake with a favourite dessert wine. £70. The Street, Walberswick IP18 6UA, 01502 722112, anchoratwalberswick.com

Butley Orford Oysterage In the best tradition of seaside fish restaurants, the oysterage is basic, with paper tablecloths and lots of pine. £46. Market Square, Orford IP12 2NU, 01394 450277, butleyorfordoysterage.co.uk

The Fish and Chip Shop Aldeburgh’s essential stop-off for freshly fried fish. Prepare to queue, then walk down to the beach with your prize. Fish and chips, £4.40. High Street, Aldeburgh IP15 5DJ, 01728 452250

Southwold Boatyard and Tea Rooms Fishermen discuss the day’s catch over breakfast at this simple café on Southwold harbour, where the display cabinets are bursting with home-made cakes. Tea and cake, around £3. Blackshore, Southwold, IP18 6TA, 01502 722593

The Lighthouse Aldeburgh’s favourite bistro casts a warm glow into the street as customers enjoy comfort food such as liver and bacon alongside plenty of seafood. £52. 77 High Street, Aldeburgh IP15 5AU, 01728 453377, lighthouserestaurant.co.uk

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

Alastair Butler, pig farmer, rugby player and a man who casts a shadow both long and wide, surprises us at breakfast in Walberswick. We’re drinking builder’s tea with the excellent bacon and sausages made from the Butler family’s free-range pork. Alastair, looking sheepish, asks if there’s any green tea going. This being East Suffolk, two parts rural isolation to one part urbanistas’ retreat, of course there is.

After his surprisingly antioxidant-rich breakfast, Alastair drives us down to see pork in action. The Butlers keep 2,000 sows and their very sweet piglets, a mile from the sea around Blythburgh, and dust rises from the paddocks, rodeo-style, as we approach. But they’re not cowboys: Blythburgh is one of the UK’s few truly free-range operations and customers from local butchers to The Fat Duck team come here to see how it’s done. Though they operate on a larger scale than most, the Butlers are typical of the many top-end food producers based in East Suffolk. They’re a family concern, they understand the land and they know everyone else in the business. The pigs and their half-moon huts can be seen from the road, attracting plenty of passing attention, but Blythburgh’s other main pull is Holy Trinity Church, where carved angels chase each other across the roof. Like the evocative ecclesiastical ruins at Dunwich, it’s a reminder that these small villages were once prosperous wool ports, and that shifting sands and coastal erosion put paid to trade in many of the area’s natural harbours.

The area’s uniquely varied terrain, maritime tradition and strong trading history has shaped the way food and drink is produced here, and it’s families like the Butlers – as well as the Klynes, the Pinneys, the Wightmans and the Pools, more of whom later – who have kept it going. But there’s another, unavoidable factor: isolation. The area’s beautiful beaches, forests and marshlands, nature reserves and private estates may be a bearable hop from London, but they’re not on the way to anywhere, except Holland. Despite recent expansion there are still relatively few supermarkets and a distinct lack of major roads; eggs and honey are sold from honesty stalls housed in decommissioned rabbit cages by the roadside.

Suvi Pool moved to this rural idyll 10 years ago when husband Piers took over High House, the Sudbourne farm established by his father Tony. A prisoner on the Burma railway, his closest friend during captivity had been a Kentish fruit farmer, and Tony was inspired to take a correspondence course and establish his own orchards. ‘When I first got here,’ says Suvi, ‘I was struck by how easy it was to get lovely food. It’s rural rather than post-industrial, and there’s a really vibrant local food economy.’ Her husband adds: ‘Maybe that’s due to lack of supermarkets, but also you can grow everything in East Anglia.’ Piers looks after crops of apples, which make the wonderful, fragrant, sweet-sharp High House juices, alongside rhubarb, asparagus, gooseberries, cherries, blackberries and plums. An experimental apricot crop has not been a success, however. ‘They’re finicky girls,’ Suvi observes.

Unless you’re a frequent visitor – and there are plenty, both influential and ordinary – the geography of the Suffolk coast, between Orford to the south and Southwold to the north, is as slippery to grasp as a freshly landed mackerel. Rivers appear when they’re least expected, creating estuaries, spits and a lot of long ways round. One of the trickiest watery obstacles also has the neatest solution. Strike out from our breakfast spot, The Anchor at Walberswick, along the sandy beach with its crouched huts and brave, early-morning swimmers, and the first-timer would be forgiven for expecting to meet Southwold just around the corner. Not so: the river Blyth lies, insolently, in your path. The bridge seems miles away, and the local solution is the rowing-boat ferry, a relaxing pursuit even for the ferryman. Kevin Hill, in charge when we stop by, takes holidays from his job as an aircraft engineer in order to man the crossing.

Clamber from the boat to the harbour, where marsh samphire grows in the mud, and it’s a pleasant stroll down to the tea rooms for Diane Church’s home-made cakes and a browse through some lesser-spotted seaside novelties; there’s not a lot of ‘kiss-me-quick’ to this town, and even the pier is tasteful. Here, the little fishing huts that dot the coastline are at their most authentic, and, at Samantha K’s Fresh Fish, Sam Klyne sells Dover sole, bass, mackerel, sardines, crab and lobster caught by husband Paul on a boat named after their daughter Laura. Fishing here is always a family concern, as Chris, Steve and Spencer Wightman demonstrate. Their great great-grandfather worked his boat in Aldeburgh in the 1800s. Now the brothers are found either at sea, longlining for the sustainable fish that Mitch Tonks and Tom Aikens love to buy, or selling it at their shop, Maximus Sustainable Fishing, in an old cowshed near Farnham. Steve’s wife Emma, who keeps cookery books at the back of the shop to provide inspiration for customers, is herself a fine source of tips; her favourite is that fish-scaling gadgets have nothing on a carefully angled scallop shell.

While there’s plenty of charm in the cowshed approach, food shopping gets a lot more sophisticated around here. Pinney’s, the oyster and smoked fish people, have a slick little shop on Orford Quay. Their oysters are grown in nearby Butley Creek, and are so plump you’ll consider a knife and fork. In the 12th century, when oysters were cheap and plentiful, they fed inhabitants of the castle built in Orford by Henry II (the 90ft keep is still impressive). Now they feed visitors to the quay, or those waiting for the National Trust boat to Orford Ness, the largest shingle spit in England, dotted with the foreboding remains of a military test facility. At the back of the shop, orders of shellfish, roe, salmon and poultry smoked at Pinney’s own tar-sticky smokehouses are readied for dispatch to local restaurants (the Crown at Woodbridge serves a fine pint of sweet-smoked prawns) as well as London clients. The company’s restaurant, Butley Orford Oysterage, serves the whole range, plus simple fresh fish, napped with brown butter and capers.

Pinney’s may be smart, but Emmett’s is special. The fruitily spoken Mark Thomas arrived at the Peasenhall ham curers and general store in 2000, bringing with him years of experience gained at the smartest food halls, including Harrods. Peasenhall is a pretty, quiet village, but Emmett’s has become the reason to visit. It’s a relentlessly seductive shop, assaulting the visitor with elephant garlic, caramelised sun-dried tomatoes, 3kg blocks of Spanish chocolate and Sri Lankan date and lime chutney, as well as local goodies. Mark Thomas also took on the production of Emmett’s famously rich, coarse sweet-cured hams and bacon, and has swapped the Guinness in the recipe for Nethergate Old Growler, brewed in Sudbury. In the outhouses where production is based, we dip our fingers into the smoky black marinade. It’s a rare chance to taste a beer that isn’t Adnams; as you’d expect, the eco-friendly Southwold brewery has Suffolk all but sewn up.

Except, that is, at Snape Maltings. Alesha Gooderham, the dynamic Australian who owns and runs the complex with husband Johnny, offers other East Anglian beers in the food hall that forms part of a series of sensitively converted malthouses. At the head of the Alde estuary, surrounded by the quiet whispering of the reed beds, The Maltings is home to Aldeburgh Music and its world-famous festival. Another event, the Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival, has been making its mark of late. It sprang out of the farmers’ market here, which unites many of Suffolk’s best producers. William Kendall, the former barrister and Green & Black’s chief executive turned organic farmer, is not too grand to man the stall selling his salad leaves, home-milled Maple Farm spelt flour and eggs from the calmest hens I’ve ever met. Katharine Salisbury brings her Gouda-style Suffolk Gold, giving lie to the reputation Suffolk cheese once had as not even good enough for sailors. Slow-growing, free range organic Sutton Hoo chickens, reared near the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, are sold whole and as lean sausages, and Piers Pool can be seen offering children a shot of High House’s russet apple juice as the stallholders pack up.

If you’re in Snape, you’re almost in Aldeburgh; just follow the river. English composer Benjamin Britten loved this long slip of a seaside town, which faces determinedly out towards a flat, grey sea. Crag Path – which is not craggy – follows the beach towards the fish huts and Maggi Hambling’s controversial Scallop sculpture. When the holiday lets along here are empty, Aldeburgh seems to have more presence than charm, but on the high street there’s a livelier feel, with up-from-London boutiques, a surfing shop that survives despite the lack of surf, and queues for the much-loved fish and chip shop.

To taste Suffolk from a plate, we come to the seaside village of Walberswick where famous residents seem to outnumber ordinary ones. Sophie and Mark Dorber run The Anchor, just up from the beach where Mark describes the purchase of a beach hut as ‘every parent’s responsibility, to make sure their children lose their virginity without drowning’. Mark is a beer enthusiast who used to preside over The White Horse in Parson’s Green; Sophie worked there as well as doing her share of private catering. They’re upgrading the pub and its rooms, but Sophie’s cooking is the best for miles. She’s just as likely to look at people and guess what they might want to eat as to hand them a menu. Friends come to feast on whole roast sea bass stuffed with lemon and herbs and served with courgette flowers from the allotment, halibut with broad beans, asparagus with ginger, chilli and sesame, and skate and halibut sauced with creamy chowder. Like all good Suffolk food people, Sophie Dorber knows the producers, so there’s often a bit of Blythborough pork belly or some Maple Farm eggs, declared by Mark to be the best. And, of course, there’s green tea if you want it.