Suffolk is the most English of counties – go now before net zero spoils it

This romantic ideal of England is under threat from all directions thanks to coastal erosion, solar panels, wind farms and pylons

Nowhere conjures up our romantic ideal of England and the English countryside more faithfully than Suffolk: soft, still, sleepy, with gentle hills, golden cornfields, ruminating cows, church towers and spires rising from bowers of green trees. Chocolate box England made real.
We owe this vision of an idyllic pastoral England to two of our finest artists, both born in Suffolk: Thomas Gainsborough in Sudbury in 1727 and John Constable in East Bergholt in 1776. 
“Suffolk made me a painter,” said Gainsborough, and although more renowned as a portrait artist, his first love was landscapes and he would often use a Suffolk-inspired scene as a backdrop for his famous subjects. 
Constable was happiest painting Suffolk’s “gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated uplands, its woods and rivers”. His evocative paintings of the Suffolk countryside such as The Cornfield, The Vale of Dedham and The Hay Wain still define rural England as we like to imagine it, and draw visitors from around the world to Constable Country.
Enjoy this bucolic Suffolk while you can though, for this most English of counties is under threat from all directions and may disappear before you know it. Suffolk has one of the fastest-eroding coastlines in Europe, losing on average 6ft a year, while soon, in the race for net zero, much of Suffolk is to be covered with solar panels, wind farms and 100 miles of pylons, stretching from Norwich to Tilbury. 
As well as its glorious countryside, Suffolk has an unfair proportion of England’s prettiest villages and small country towns, unspoilt until now by modern industry and major roads. Typical of the former is Cavendish, where a cluster of cottages, pink-washed and thatched, snuggle up to the medieval church tower like chicks around a mother hen. Cavendish begat the Dukes of Devonshire, a result of Elizabethan merchant William Cavendish from Cavendish marrying England’s richest woman at the time, Bess of Hardwick.
Long Melford, for many the perfect English village, has a claim to the country’s longest village high street: almost three miles of inns, art galleries and antique shops, set between two of England’s finest moated Tudor houses, Melford Hall and Kentwell Hall. A stately set of Elizabethan almshouses sits beside arguably Suffolk’s most magnificent church, 15th-century Holy Trinity, which boasts the longest nave of any parish church in England and some 75 windows, many with remains of rare medieval stained glass. One of the windows shows a portrait of a 15th-century Duchess of Norfolk, the inspiration for John Tenniel’s illustration of the Queen of Hearts from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Then there is picture-perfect Lavenham, described by the late archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan, and many others, as the “prettiest village in England”, where narrow streets wind uphill between a feast of medieval timber, red roofs and pale pink and yellow gabled houses. Constable went to school in Lavenham and there made friends with Jane Taylor, the author of the nursery rhyme Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, written while gazing out of her bedroom window at the night sky from her parents’ house, the Old Grange in Shilling Street.
Kersey, which tumbles enchantingly down the hillside towards the “water splash”, was the star of the opening episode of BBC series Lovejoy, and gave its name to a type of coarse woollen cloth, immortalised by Shakespeare (First Gentleman to Lucio in Measure for Measure: “I had as lief be a list of an English kersey as be piled”).
As for the county’s small towns, little Clare is home to a Norman castle mound, England’s first Augustinian priory, founded in 1248, and the 14th-century Ancient House, now a museum, rich in intricate floral pattern plasterwork. It gives its name to a historic royal title – when Edward III’s son Lionel of Antwerp married an heiress from Clare, Elizabeth de Burgh, they became the 1st Duke and Duchess of Clarence.
In Sudbury, a pleasant town surrounded by England’s most extensive area of ancient water meadows, a statue of Thomas Gainsborough points his palette down the street towards the house where he was born, today a museum and the only birthplace of a major English artist open to the public.
There has been a tide mill on the River Deben at Woodbridge for more than 800 years, with the present mill, built in 1793, being the oldest of England’s only two working tide mills and still producing wholemeal flour for sale. Edward FitzGerald, the translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, lived in and loved Woodbridge, and is buried two miles away in Boulge, beneath a rose bush grown from cuttings of the bush on the Persian poet’s grave at Naishapur. A little way downstream is England’s most important Anglo-Saxon site, the Sutton Hoo ship burial. 
Suffolk’s crumbling coast runs for 50 miles from Lowestoft, inhabited for more than 700,000 years and England’s most easterly settlement, to Felixstowe, England’s largest container port. In between lie elegant Southwold, home to Adnams, independent brewer of English ales, and Dunwich, once England’s premier port, now one of the world’s largest lost cities, having sunk beneath the waves after a storm in 1286. The bells of St Peter’s, then Suffolk’s largest church, can sometimes be heard ringing mournfully across the water.
At Thorpeness, the House in the Clouds, a 70ft-high water tower, provides England’s most unusual coastal holiday let, while Aldeburgh, the burial place of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, England’s first woman doctor, mayor and magistrate, boasts the country’s finest surviving moot hall and one of its most famous music festivals. 
At Orford, England’s only polygonal castle, begun by Henry II in 1165, overlooks the beach where the country’s first nuclear weapon, the Blue Danube, was developed and tested in 1958. Meanwhile, a few miles further down the coast is Bawdsey Manor, the world’s first operational radar station.
While Suffolk’s glory lies in its small country towns and villages, there is much of interest to be found in the larger towns, too.
Newmarket has been the home of that most English of sports, horse racing, the Sport of Kings, since James I arrived in 1605 and declared the flat land of the heath ideal. England’s first official horse race, the Town Plate, was run at Newmarket and won by Charles II, the only reigning monarch ever to win a race.
Bury St Edmunds was the first town in England to be laid out in a grid pattern, the work of Baldwin, the Norman abbot of what was then the largest abbey in northern Europe. Today, dignified Georgian streets and market squares jostle about the much-restored cathedral with its detached bell tower, one of the finest Norman structures in England. Opposite Bury’s grand Victorian Corn Exchange, now a Wetherspoon, sits the Nutshell, which claims to be England’s smallest pub, with a bar measuring just 15ft by 7ft.
Ipswich, the county town, founded by the Saxons in AD 600 and the oldest English town, has an agreeable tangle of medieval streets at its centre worth exploring, gathered about the picturesque 15th-century Ancient House, famed for its pargeting (decorative plastering). 
Ipswich, of course, sits on the river Orwell, from which George Orwell, the author of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, took his pen name. Oh, the irony, as the quintessential English loveliness of John Constable’s Suffolk gives way to the dystopian horrors of Ed Miliband’s net zero. Do see the best of Suffolk – while you still can.
One of England’s most iconic hotels, the loveliest half-timbered building in a village renowned for its half-timbered architecture, the Swan provides luxury accommodation fit for a king or a queen. Rooms from £262 B&B.
Friendly gastropub with rooms and garden chalets in a quiet seaside village near Southwold. It’s a two-minute walk to the beach through sand dunes. Rooms from £160.