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Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of Britain

Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of the British Isles

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Open Country: Julia Blackburn and the Suffolk coast

Julia Blackburn and the Suffolk coast

BBC Radio 4 - Open Country, Julia Blackburn and the Suffolk coast

Helen Mark talks to the writer Julia Blackburn about her love of the Suffolk coastline.

Helen Mark takes a virtual walk with the writer Julia Blackburn to discuss her love of the Suffolk coastline and the ways in which this ancient seascape has influenced her work.

The writer Julia Blackburn has lived much of the last forty years on the Suffolk coast where she has written biographies, poetry, radio plays and accounts of her own life.  In recent years it is the landscape that has captured her imagination and her most recent book, 'Time Song', tells of how she became fascinated with the area known as Doggerland - a mass of land that once joined Suffolk and Holland and which is now submerged beneath the waves of the North Sea.  

Helen Mark joins Julia for a virtual walk along the Suffolk coast, starting at Sizewell and the shadow of the nuclear power station and along to the marshlands at Minsmere with all its accompanying bird-life.  From there it's onto Dunwich where Julia once found a human skull, and onto Covehithe where she came across a bit of Mammoth vertebrae.  For Julia these objects are part of the 'visitable past' and they become a means of telling stories about this precarious landscape.  They finish in Pakefield where, in 2001, two men discovered a fragment of flint that provided proof of human settlements dating back 700'000 years.  For Julia these objects tell a story of a fragment of time, which combined with the huge skies and the muddy sea make it a magical place.

With contributions from Alex Pilling from RSPB Minsmere and Professor Martin Bell from the University of Reading.

Produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Toby Field, with additional recordings by Sophie Anton and Alex Pilling.

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