4 April

Some places are haunted, and I think we went to one today. No white ladies or headless men in chains, but something in the ether seeped into our bones, an otherworldly, eerie feeling.
Yesterday was a gloomy, freezing cold day. We knew that spring was lurking somewhere behind the clouds, but the skies were too leaden and we were too cold to summon up any energy. It’s often quite relaxing to have a do-nothing day, the adults pottering, no pressure on the children, but somehow yesterday it didn’t work. I think it was because we felt we ought to be outside, that the days of being cooped up in winter were behind us, but the weather wasn’t co-operating. In the end, the day at risk of descending into frayed nerves and fretful wails, we spent part of the afternoon holed up in J’s treehouse, wrapped up in blankets and drinking hot chocolate. It turned out to be a perfect combination of outdoor activity and comforting indulgence, and calmed tempers which were in danger of unravelling.

Today there was a glimpse of sun, flirting coyly behind the cloud cover, and we felt up to going further afield. We went off to Sutton Hoo, on the river Deben, where the Anglo-Saxon burial ship of one of the earliest English kings was discovered. It truly is one of the most magnificent archaeological finds in our history, and although the main treasures are in the British museum, there are reconstructions and plenty of artefacts to see in the museum. The main draw, though, is to walk out to see the burial mounds themselves, especially on a bluff, slightly raw day like today. Overlooking the tidal estuary of the Deben, on a spur of a hill where the wind howls in straight off the North Sea, sit a group of about twenty earthen mounds, dreaming quietly for hundreds of years among the sandy, rabbit-infested soil.

It’s always been seen as a magical place, on the margin between myth, legend and documented history, and the strangeness surrounding the original excavations adds fuel to the fire of mystery. Although there’s evidence that some mounds were partially excavated (and robbed, of course) as far back as the sixteenth century, for generations the mounds had been little more than a curious feature of the local landscape until the 1930’s. The owner of the land in 1939, a Mrs Edith Pretty, widowed and living alone with her small son, had long been intrigued by the grassy mounds she could see from her drawing room window, and started to have strange and vivid dreams where she saw warriors in what appeared to be a funeral procession. By all accounts a slightly fey lady, interested in spiritualism, she invited friends with similar interests to stay with her, one of whom claimed to have a vision of great treasure, along with the same helmeted warriors. To cut a very long story short (and I’m aware many of you, particularly those also from Suffolk, may know all of this), she persuaded an eccentric local archaeologist, Basil Brown, to help her excavate the mounds. The rest, as they say, is history; helped by the gamekeeper and the gardener, Brown unearthed the huge ghost ship of the 6th century Wuffing dynasty, and the burial artefacts of, it is widely agreed, King Raedwald. His iconic and awe-inspiring bronze helmet, staring spookily out at you from eyeless sockets is rightly famous; for me the location itself is imposing and haunting, the ships of the Anglo-Saxon traders sailing up the wide river still visible, you might think, out of the corner of your eye.

Raedwald was apparently the overload of all the English kings of the period, and played a part in the establishment of Christianity. It has also seemed fitting to many that this illuminating find, symbolic in so many ways of the birth of the English nation, should be discovered right on the eve of the second World War (in fact the excavations were severely held up because of it). There’s no new-age spirituality here, though, no Glastonbury-esque crystal shops, no healing or Tarot offered. Instead there is something solemn and quiet about it, as if we are all still absorbing the enormity of the remains that slept there for so long. As we turned and left the mounds, walking away from the lonely heath back to the bustling modernity of the visitors centre, I felt that we were leaving people behind, layer upon layer of them, their lives recorded in the flinty earth. The café, the children’s play area, and of course, the shop, returned my sense of normality, but the past still overtakes you sometimes and trips you up, often when you least expect it. I thought about other locations imbued with a sense of strangeness, of times colliding. A friend, with whom I occasionally run, won’t ever let us run past a certain copse along an ordinary country lane; she doesn’t know why, and nor do I. I’m fairly robust about haunted houses and spooky woods, but something unsettled me today. Maybe it was just the past, tripping me up again.