To the west of the town the flat land on which much of it lies drops gently away, the landscape changing from fields of wheat, sugar beet, potatoes and onions to smaller fields divided by old hedgerows in which....
....the first spring blossom is beginning to appear.
There are ponds along this gentle escarpment where mallard have overwintered. Local people drive out to this particular pond because they can park right beside it and, without leaving their cars, feed the ducks.
The land here is drained by small ditches which, in the bright weather of the last few days, have water beetles skimming their surfaces and the first lesser celandine flowering along their banks.
These ditches lead down into reed-lined fleets which wander across lands occupied by extensive fields in which the winter wheat is being....
....grazed by families of mute swans, a mixture of adults and last year's young, seen here on King's Fleet.
The weather is exceptionally warm, up to 14C out of the breeze, and this has encouraged the coltsfoot along the fleet banks to burst into flower.
The biggest fleets are pumped out into the Deben estuary. Each time we walk along the Deben's flood wall we see a few small groups of wildfowl but their numbers and variety seem limited compared to last year. Yesterday we stopped to watch half-a-dozen shelduck, the first we've seen this winter.
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