Suffolk's is a crowded landscape, where intensive arable and pastoral farming rubs shoulders with large human settlements - though we have noticed how few of the resident humans walk any distance into their countryside.
I cannot pretend I find this an attractive landscape: it's too flat, too soft, too....
....closely controlled by man.
We've noticed how winter is the time when landowners assert their domination: hedges are cut, trees lopped, fences repaired....
....new trees planted, usually in orderly rows, as if to prove they weren't propagated naturally, and....
....ditches and fleets cleared - the mud from the bottom of this fleet can be seen in the field to the left. There was a thriving population of dragonflies here last summer. Since the dragonfly reproductive cycle depends on their nymphs overwintering in ponds, ditches and streams, it will be interesting to see how they have survived.
Our local landscape is also cut by one of Britain's busiest roads, the A14, serving the port of Felixstowe. Driving along it, the carnage of birds and mammals, particularly foxes, badgers and deer, is distressing.
Yet this is a landscape which, generously managed, we should be able to share with a wealth of wildlife.
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