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For April, the weather is unseasonably warm. The weekend has been wall-to-wall sunshine, and hot with it. The trees are heavy with blossom, the skies an electric blue, and it feels for all the world like summer is here already.

So, deciding to take advantage of it while it lasts, we spent Sunday zizzing back and forth along the coast between Orford and Sizewell, and walking through the gauze heaths to Thorpeness.

I first went to Orford and Sizewell about this time last year. Orford - and more specifically the Ness - was the site of Britain’s earliest experiments into nuclear armaments, and many of the original test buildings (and some unexploded ordinance) remain in situ. Sizewell is the site of a large nuclear power station, no doubt built near the sea to provide a quick and simple means of cooling (and so it could breed double-headed fish for the lucrative Billy Bass market).

Unfortunately the Ness isn’t yet open for public visits this year, so we could only walk around the village this time around, and stopped in at the smoke house where you can take your own meat and fish and have it hung and smoked to your own particular tastes. The smoked stilton was very tempting, but I didn’t think it would stand up well to a day in a hot car, and so we left it where it was, took pictures of the fish smoking away in the open air, and took the car up to Sizewell.

The stretch of beach that passes by the power station there is pebbly, and although not the country’s best it is clean and doesn’t shelve too steeply. Behind the pebbles and the thin strips of sand are wide stretches of gauze-covered heath, which at this time of year are full of yellow bright flowers that have a delicate smell of coconut.

From there you can walk for a leisurely hour or two along the coast to Thorpeness, the bizarre little town with a massive man-made lake which is never any deeper than 3ft, the House in the Clouds, which towers above the trees on a tall wooden foundation, and a life-size concrete crocodile waiting to snap from the trees.

So we headed that way, passing some fearsome pigs fighting each other in great clouds of dust, lambs plucking leaves from the gauze bushes, the decaying shells of wartime defences and more rabbits than we could ever possibly count.

But the most interesting find of the day was a seal washed up on the beach.

A single droopy eye aside, it looked to be in perfect condition. Dead, of course, and starting to smell if you got downwind of its tail, but perfectly preserved.

It was massive - eight feet in length - and the shape of a hairy, furry slug laid out on the pebbly sand. I never realised what luxurious coats seals had until then, and although neither of us touched it I’d imagine it to feel like a short-haired retriever if you ran your fingers through its coat.

We sat by it for a while and watched a small dog timidly creep up and sniff the tail. As soon as it caught the smell coming off the slowly decaying body its courage returned. Recognising that there was no danger from this lifeless form, it stood up proud and gave a loud, single, decisive bark, then scampered off along the shoreline.

We took that as our cue to leave, and headed off in the same direction, leaving the dead seal’s fate in the hands of the next high tide.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Journal, Picture story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.