East Suffolk

Walk Details:
Date: 12/2/2005
Total ascent: 1m/ 3ft
Total distance walked: 0.74 miles
Walk difficulty: 0.5/10
Enjoyment rating: 1.5/10
Best bits: First top of the day, completing all the tops in grid square "TM"
Worst bits: Drizzle, mud sprayed over car, not getting access to airbase
Walkers: Anth, Jim
Car Parking: We pulled in at the roadside on a minor road at TM 020 508

Top details:
Name: Wattisham AIrfield
County top number: 38 of 207
Grid reference: TM 02363 49929 MAP
Height above sea level: 91m/299ft
How nice was the top? 1.5/10
Views? 2/10
Description/Notes: The highest accessible point of East Suffolk is an indeterminate point on a private track to the south of Wattisham Airfield. There may be marginally higher points within the airfield itself, but we could not gain access.

The Walk:

One of our main walking aims for this year was to get as many of the low county tops out of the way as possible - we didn't want to be left wth the depressing task of visiting these after climbing all the higher tops. With this in mind, our first major bagging day of 2005 saw us heading to East Anglia on what we'd called the "Flatlands Tour". I had a vague hope that we might be able to beat our one day bagging record of 8 tops in one day in the Midlands last November, but knew that it would be difficult given the much larger distances involved in East Anglia.

I had been woken up the previous night by howling gales and sleet rattling against the bedroom window, and was quite pleased that by the time we came to leave, the sky had cleared (although the wind was still strong).

Once Jim had driven us round the M25 & up the A12, we came to our first top of the day. Whilst it would be easy to walk to, being low and flat, it had been a bit of a research nightmare. First of all was the question of whether East Suffolk was ever a county in its own right. Some sources referred to it as a "Part" of Suffolk, but others said it used to have its own County Council running it. That was enough for me to include it in our list - we didn't want to have anyone coming back to me later on and saying we missed it out, so we thought we'd better do it just in case.

Next was the problem of tracking down where it was. Fortunately I had an old road map which clearly showed the borders of East Suffolk, and equally fortunately they corresponded with modern day district boundaries, and thus I could trace them on a modern OS map. The contours on the OS map showed that there were two areas in the former East Suffolk where altitude exceeded ninety metres - one (the smaller area) was within Wattisham Airfield, with the larger (and therefore more likely to be higher) one to the south of the airfield. Both were very close to the boundary with West Suffolk.

Neither the pink nor orange OS maps showed any spot heights within the contours on the East Suffolk side, although just across the West Suffolk border there was a trig point with a spot height of 92 metres. The only option was to try to get within both contours and see which was the highest.

Given that the smaller contour was within a military base, this wasn't going to be easy. I mean, saying you want to stand on the highest point of a county that may never have existed has got to be one of the weakest excuses ever for getting inside an airbase!

I rang a chap at the airfield museum, who was understandably confused by my request but informed me that we were unlikely to get in, as for security reasons even the museum had recently had to be shifted outside of the air base. They did give me a contact number for one of the squadrons though. On ringing this number I was given another number for the squadron commander's office. They asked me to ring base security, who promptly delegated the whole confusing matter upwards to the head of security. I was getting the impression that I was scaring people and they wanted someone else to sort it out.

It took some time to get hold of the head of security, who has asked me not to reveal his name or rank (this was now getting scary for me!). First he had a day off, then he called back when I had a day off. When I finally got to speak to him he was a very pleasant chap, who seemed completely unfazed by my strange request. Unfortunately he said that in the current security climate, he could not allow me access to the base. This was quite understandable (and I'm sure our GPS and camera would not have been allowed in anyway!) but also a little disappointing having spoken to so many people. I'm slightly worried that I've now been classified as a threat to national security.

We decided that we would have to concentrate our efforts on the larger of the two contours as this was larger it was more likely to contain the highest point anyway. Much of this second contour is within the airbase too, but from the OS orange map we felt we might be able to access part of it via a track starting from the oddly named village of Nedging Tye, just across the border in West Suffolk.

Jim parked his car in a mud wallow alongside Crowcroft Road in Nedging Tye. Driving up to Nedging Tye through Whatfield ("that field" we instantly piped up) we'd made a fairly impressive ascent (for this part of the world) and thought we might actually get some views. Unfortunately it started drizzling as soon as we got out of the car. We had a brief wander along the B1078 to see the aforementioned trig point (we just managed to glimpse it through a hedge to the south of the road), before returning to the entrance to Crowcroft Road. Just east of here, an ungated track led out into open fields. It had a large, broken off sign saying "No cess". We decided that this must have something to do with a ban on sewage disposal, and as we had not been told specifically that there was "no access" we thought it would do no harm to nip a few hundred metres down the track.

After quarter of a kilometre the track passes into the former county of East Suffolk, with flat and open fields to our right, across which there were some slight views of distant hills. To our left was some sort of utilities enclosure, a water pumping station or similar. Beyond that we could see the radar dishes and associated paraphernalia of the airbase, shut away behind high fences. There didn't seem to be any planes flying.

Beyond the pumping station the track appeared to slope downwards slightly, and we decided to take the entrance to the pumping station as the highest point. The GPS altitude was 91 metres; we reasoned that the trig point in West Suffolk (at 92 metres) would have been located at the highest point of this almost uniformly flat plateau, and reasoned that even in the airbase we'd be lucky to find anywhere higher than this.

It was funny, but looking further east into East Suffolk, we could see hills in the distance that appeared to be higher than Wattisham Airfield, despite the fact that according to the OS map this couldn't possibly be the case. This is a common optical illusion that I've noticed at several county tops. Even nearby ground can appear to be higher; something that has often caused us to run madly all over the place to spots that are actually no higher than where you've just come from. I don't know what causes this, it's just plain weird!

Having bagged this top, we headed the short distance back to the car, straight into a keen wind that seemed to force the drizzle right through our clothes. Starting up the car, a big arc of mud sprayed across Jim's car, leaving a large blob on the passenger window that started out green but later strangely turned purple as it dried. Whenever I looked out the window for the rest of the day it made me feel faintly nauseous.

What with military occupation, drizzle and mud, East Suffolk had not been too welcoming. On the plus side, we had completed all the county tops with the grid reference prefixed by "TM" (admittedly this was the only one), which meant we wouldn't have to come back this way again. We set off for its westerly partner hoping for a more friendly reception.