Photos of Suffolk - Shingle Street

You can guess what is in abundance at Shingle Street...

There are, of course, miles of what seems like well-sorted 25mm shingle (gravel) beach. There are a few houses - the white row of coastguard cottages, a Martello Tower and huge open vistas of sea and sky. Just off the beach there is a frightening looking swirl of white water, where the river Ore mixes with the North Sea.

Image 86. Phil Shimmon provided this postcard of Shingle Street (slightly cropped by me) showing the old Lifeboat Inn, circa 1930. To the far right you can see the gable end and chimney of the German Ocean Mansion and just to the left of that is the old Shingle Street chapel.

It is a rather strange, desolate but magical place. The notice boards you see before you leave the car park rightly declare the area as a "special place" which is also formally designated an SSSI - Sight of Special Scientific Interest - because of the rare flora that survives this wind-swept area of beach. Below are two poems about Shingle Street...

Shingle Street

A tide-bone of drift-wood
shivers in the desk light:
an ossified worm
licked by electricity.

One by one
the surrounding houses
douse their lights
and disappear.

The root-stem trembles:
a luminous blue dragonfly,
a needle which leans
to Orford and Ufford.

Night comes towards me
over the water,
the wind and waves
are breathing as one.

A wriggle of bone
from Shingle Street
is dancing
on my desk.

And here at last
looking through my window
is the quiet face
of the moon.

Shingle Street

Bury me lightly when I am dead
So that my spirit can rise,
And none shall know that my ghost has fled,
None shell know where the imp has sped
When the owl in the darkness cries.
Out of the grave I shall hurry and fling
Careless wings to the winds that sing
Over the marshes, until my feet
Dance to the shore at Shingle Street,
Dance so light along Hollesley Bay,
My fleeting feet will forget how they
Crept in pain when, mortal feet,
They suffered the pebbles of Shingle Street,
And if the moon should rise from the sea,
Making a golden path for me

I’ll cast myself to the waves caresses
(For ghosts don’t bother with bathing dresses!)
And swim right out on the golden track,
Till I turn at last and there look back
To the trees’ dark line beyond the bay,
And the square church tower of silver grey,
For I know that in death I shell never forget
Those trees and church…
But I’m not dead yet,
And life is sweet on a clear hot day
When the sunlight dances on Hollesley Bay,
When the blue sky down to the blue sea smiles
And shingle stretches for golden miles,
And the marsh shimmers green. Ah, life is sweet
When the sun shines down on Shingle Street.

Phil Shimmon, who sent me the poem on the right, added this: looking through some of the issues of the local magazine (The Peninsula) that I have here I found a piece written by Sarah Openshaw of Kelvedon, Essex. This is from the winter edition number 106 2001/2.

She writes,

"I DON'T KNOW who the poem is by but I have always known it, the copy I have hung in my mother, Noreen Pritchard Carr's restaurant at Aide House at Shingle Street and was published in "Punch" but that must be well over fifty years ago now! I have a vague recollection that it was by someone who used to come regularly to lunch there and gave my mother a copy. I hope others, who like me, have fond memories of Shingle Street, will enjoy reading it. I am sure the writer would recognise Shingle Street today, only the distance of the sea from the houses seem to change."

Yet another Shingle Street mystery!