The Big Loop: Boxford, Aldham Church and Hadleigh

A long walk through some of south-west Suffolk's hidden gems, via a reminder that its past was not always so peaceful. Part I: Boxford to Aldham.

From the Boxford bypass, I took the path across the recently harvested wheatfield in the picture below. This is soon to be new houses, so this might be the last time I step up and over the squidgy heaps of wet straw lying across the path, waiting for the bailer. I turned right at the bottom towards the small woodland. Today it was dry enough to follow the designated footpath through the trees (in winter, this often turns into an impenetrable bog, forcing walkers up into the field to the right).

Taking the path to the left, I stopped just before Cox Hill House to take in the view of the surprisingly wide horizon, dominated by the five Douglas pines at Hagmore Green. They look like a family of distant, hunch-shouldered giants on the march (although the last big storm turned the western-most one into a tyrannosaurus rex) and can be seen from many miles around. From the massed pines of Assington Thicks sprout the communications antennae at Little Cornard, another familiar landmark.

I then took the road to the right towards Kersey, through Wickerstreet Green, a small hamlet which has managed to acquire houses of just about every era and style, from genuine Tudor beams to 1980s executive mock-Georgian, with 1960s glass thrown in for good measure. A little way after a tree which still sports a faded UKIP 'Vote Leave' poster from the 2016 referendum, a path goes off to the right through a field planted with oilseed rape. Bizarrely, I see five green woodpeckers fly up from the crop into a nearby tree. I hear them hurling verbal abuse as I walk past to take the path through the hedge on the left.

Right at the road and right again on to the Justice Wood road, past a long, thin cottage with an idyllic orchard where geese sometimes graze, then left on to a track with a bristling array of signs telling walkers to put dogs on leads and warning of ground-nesting birds. I wonder whether the Walnutgate Mystery was ever solved: last year a new sign appeared in this spot, wishing vengeance on the persons unknown who had stolen the sign-writer's walnuts. It's not a welcoming place, but perhaps that can be expected from somewhere that leaves UKIP posters on display for three years.

I pressed on towards Kersey Vale, the path meandering strangely off to the left through a narrow wood and back out again on to the track it has just left. Past a place where there is an almost permanent bonfire and a weirdly fenced-off area planted with shrubs (I assume ground cover for the nesting game birds), I take the path downhill directly across a wheatfield. Soon, when the field is harvested and ploughed, it will be difficult to see where the path is. Mine have often been the first bootprints in the mud to leave a faint clue for fellow walkers.

At the bottom, I turn left along the edge of the field, swishing as noisily as I can through the long grass. I think of one of my friends who is terrified of snakes and imagine her sprinting full-pelt back up the hill if she had been with me and had noticed that I was trying to warn any hapless reptiles of my presence. The extra-long grass stems tear at my ankles and six-foot nettles leer at me on either side. One or two find their way through the thin fabric of my trousers and leave a hot red scald. In Russian, they say that nettles burn, which is a better description for the sensation than sting.

To the right is a footbridge over a small stream, dry in the summer, prettily burbling in the winter. Today I find a dead bird just before the bridge. It is around the size of a blackbird, speckled grey, but is not a thrush. I can't identify it and it makes me think again of how very little I really know about the natural world around me when I walk. The more I try to learn, the more I find I don't know.

Up some wooden steps and left along the bottom of a steep field of more wheat, a stream on my left. In the corner of the field, I go over a stile and turn right down a track past an intriguing sign saying 'Airfield'. I have never seen any aerial activity here and wonder about its origins.

Turning right, I follow a broad valley, Kersey visible at the top of the hill to my left. Somewhere along here on the right is another, larger footbridge. You have to look for it and it is easy to miss. I sometimes wonder if it moves when no one is looking. It leads to a path up a steep field, which seems to widen out as you climb. The last time I walked here, the path was a straight, reddish clay line parting a sea of bright yellow rapeseed flowers. At the top is an unlikely cross-roads of paths, a finger-post offering a choice of four directions. I carry on straight and follow the path curving through the hedge to the left, then up the hill towards the Hadleigh Bypass. Keeping on the path in the field, I follow it past an incongruous patch of wild lupins until it goes steeply down the bank to the corner of the Bildeston Road.

Crossing over, I take the track called Stone Street, past Peyton Hall Farm (confusingly, there is another Peyton Hall in Boxford, also down a drive off a road called Stone Street). Beyond the farm house, the path continues through long grass to a footbridge over the river Brett. This is a proper river, with shimmering ripples and sinuous waterweeds following the current and sometimes shoals of tiny fish. I hope in vain for a kingfisher (I have only ever seen one in my life), but none appears. The path goes past the mill house - right past it, through the front garden. I always feel that I'm intruding and slink past as quickly as I can.

At the road, I go right, then left down another footpath which follows the bottom of a wide, open field, intensely green, with a rather picturesque hillock ahead. There is a choice of ways by a footbridge over the ditch: straight ahead to the back road towards Kersey, or right up to the main Aldham road. There should be a bridle path from this road leading straight to the church, but my many attempts to use it have always failed: locked gates, barbed wire, impenetrable nettles, aggressive cattle with calves...

Today, I carry straight on, still following the ditch, and on to the small road which leads past an old quarry and up to a corner named after a 'Dutch House'. From here, there is no choice but to walk on the road, but it is generally wide, with good visibility. A small turning on the right takes me towards the church, past an ancient pond covered in lilies and the beautiful Aldham Hall, with its romantic, rose-filled garden.

The church is on the left. It overlooks a valley, with another ancient lily pond and a distant view of Kersey. I sit on a bench donated by a family to remember a loved one and admire the view. I don't go in because I know from past experience that if the door shuts behind you, it's difficult to open from the inside and I don't want to be stuck there until the next visitor arrives. Luckily, it seems to be well visited: past encounters I have had here include an Australian tourist tracing his family tree and a local man checking up on the old wooden pews (apparently, a threat by 'Them' to move or replace them had scandalised the good people of Aldham). I have walked here so often that some of the headstones are like old friends. My particular favourite commemorates a dear departed whose husband chose the words 'The strife is o'er, halleluyah!'. I like to think he meant well.

Part II: Aldham Church to Boxford via Hadleigh.

Leaving the church, I have the choice of going down an old path directly in front of the door and into the field, or going back to where I came in. There is a gate lading into the field, but it has been locked for many years and the only way through is to brave the barbed wire. I take the more sensible route back through the main gate and follow the sign pointing through the field on the left. For as long as I have known it, this field has not been used for either pasture or crops: it is a little piece of peace, green and tranquil, in keeping with the atmosphere of this special place.

The footpath leads left and then towards the right, up a slight incline. At the corner of the next field, there is little to guide the walker. This is an arable field and for much of the year, it is filled with either rows of cereal too perfect to walk on willingly, or else with boot-tugging rape seed or fava beans. Although it is tempting to follow the mown edge round to the right, past a small stand of trees enclosed by a fence, this will lead you astray. The official path goes straight ahead across the crops, up another slight incline.

When I walked it this week (now October), it had been recently ploughed, leaving a daunting vista of sticky, brown waves, more like a surreal seascape than a field. I stepped from one crest to the next, just about keeping afloat, and scanning the troughs for unusual objects coaxed to the surface by the plough. It is often astonishing what you find: old crockery (I once found a black teapot, complete with lid); coloured glass objects of unguessable origin; ancient oyster shells. This time, there was nothing but the multi-patterned flints, some of them so finely decorated with complex lines and shapes that they look, at first glance, like shards of fine porcelain.

At the top of the field, you come to a house on a small track, leading off to the right, past a reservoir. After this, it becomes a grassy path again, along the top of the field, from which you appear to be walking on the same level as the windvane at the very top of Aldham Church's extraordinary round tower. This might not be visible for much longer, though, as a screen of young trees has been planted to the right of the path. After a few hundred metres, there is a footbridge to the left over a ditch and a path leads straight across the field towards the A1071 at the "new" roundabout at the top of Lady Lane.

Just before the main road, you come to a memorial to one of Hadleigh's past rectors, Rowland Taylor, who met a terrible fiery end on this spot in 1555, at the hands of the Counter-Reformation. A later inscription commemorates his fellow church official, who met an equally horrendous fate in Norwich. It's hard to imagine that such savagery was once perpetrated on peaceful Aldham Common.

Continuing across the A1071 (not the easiest or safest crossing, as the traffic is relentless), I walked down Lady Lane past the industrial estate, a site of surprising international enterprise (Erben: "Durban, San Francisco, Hadleigh"), into Angel Street and Hadleigh town centre. Left into the HIgh Street and right into Church Lane, I stopped to admire the view of the church, with its unusual slate-covered steeple (the tiles seem like silvery scales and it always reminds me of a mermaid's tail), the Deanery and the Guildhall. These are all magnificent medieval buildings, beautifully preserved and equal to anything the more famous Lavenham has to offer. Many of the chimney stacks (and there is a host of them), have tiers of strange, spikey bricks. These seem to be a local speciality and a few of the very old houses in this area (including one in Edwardstone), have similar features.

Taking the path to the left of the church brings you out into Market Street, opposite The Ram pub, then round to the right on to Toppesfield Bridge. I stopped to admire the view of the river, complete with a flotilla of young swans, no longer signets, but not yet quite changed into their snowy adult plumage.

I took the gravelly road directly ahead up the hill past graceful Holbeck House. To the right are some of the tallest trees in the area, probably planted by a former denizen of the manor house. They include an enormous poplar and a grandiose horse chestnut. I can't decide whether they are reassuring in their timelessness, or whether they are vaguely threatening: they are so much bigger and older than everything around them.

The landscape here is hilly, some of it pitted with strange hollows. I continued up the steep track, recently re-surfaced, to the meeting of the ways at the top. Here you have the choice of Constitution Hill, back into Hadleigh on the right, left towards the Shelley road, ahead and to the right, past the Halfway House and across Hadleigh Heath, or ahead and to the left across a series of fields towards Postead Heath. I chose the ahead and left option and followed the path straight on, then to the left and down a steep incline on the right. I call this place the Little Lake District, as it has one of the only genuinely steep hills in the area and different flora (gorse, bracken and sheep-nibbled grass). I noticed that the sheep have been replaced by some young black cattle (sensibly fenced off from the footpath - thank you, farmer: if only all your kin would do the same).

A small footbridge, recently replaced (previously the only way past the enormous puddle which forms here sometimes was to swing across using the kissing gate as a trapeze) takes you across the lowest point of the valley, where the path leads upwards again across a steep pasture. At the top is a signpost and an entrance to a very large arable field. The Lake District is gone now: this wide expanse is almost perfectly flat. The path goes straight across the middle and in some weather can feel wild and exposed. Here, as in the ploughed field in Aldham, I again had the feeling almost of being at sea - alone and tiny, at the mercy of sun, rain and wind.

At the far end of the field is another signpost, something to aim for when the track is not obvious. Beyond it is a surprisingly wide road (built to service the quarries off to the left, which are still worked) and another path along the side of an arable field. At the far corner of this are some steps down to a wooden footbridge, after which the path teeters off to the right along a garden fence on the left and a deep ditch on the right. It turns sharp left and along the side of a garden. In the summer, this is sometimes a good spot to find a grass snake basking in the sun.

At the road, I turn left, then right across three fields in a straight line, then right again on to Potash Lane. Here, the best route back to Boxford is to continue straight across and follow the path to the A1071, which comes out nearly opposite the Butcher's Arms pub at Bower House Tye. Crossing over the main road (which needs extreme caution here, as there is a bend which makes it difficult to see vehicles coming from the Hadleigh direction), take the private road directly ahead, at the end of which, on the right, is a bridle path leading past Bower House Farm. After the woods, a clear signpost on the left guides you down a wide, grassy track which takes you back to the path along the bottom of the field behind the houses in Brook Barn Road and on to the Kersey Road at the bottom of Cox Hill. Boxford centre is to the left, round the bend in the road.

This is a long loop (it takes me around 4.5 to 5 hours, depending on how long I linger at my favourite spots), but well worth the effort, as it takes in many of the loveliest local views and most fascinating buildings. Enjoy!