Wander along the river Blyth near Hen Reedbeds during the day and there’s plenty to enjoy. You can take in the view across the fields to St Edmund’s church tower, watch wading birds stalking the muddy foreshore, and pick out the outline of an old water pump, long shorn of its sails.
Take a walk along the same riverbank at night, however, and the place takes on a much more thrilling atmosphere. That church tower, now illuminated, shines like a beacon across the plain; the wading birds cry out to one another from the Stygian gloom, competing with the booming bitterns and the mellifluous singing of nightingales; and that abandoned water pump is washed in spectral moonlight.
Every September, around the time of the full moon, the river Blyth is the starting point of a nocturnal ramble I lead around this beguiling corner of Suffolk. Our eight-mile hike starts at dusk’s fading light as the mudflats of the river Blyth begin to release a pungent, almost primordial scent.
En route I teach my group some tricks to help them navigate by night: we find the North Star using the Plough and Cassiopeia; count off the bends in the river; and sniff the night air for the whereabouts of the sewage plant.
Passing the ghostly forms of night anglers on the shingle beach, we leave the promenade to pick our way over a low marshland. Using the lights of a riverside pub as a guide, we cross the river by an old bridge that once carried a short-lived branch line and head across heathland, covered with gorse.
In dense woodland, we listen in to the conversation of a pair of tawny owls before tramping out on to a boardwalk, passing Moses-like through a sea of chalk-white reeds.
We end our walk in Blythburgh, whose gargantuan church is known as the cathedral of the marshes. One of its doors bears the claw marks of the terrible hound Black Shuck. He’s one creature of the night we are glad not to have encountered.
Dixe Wills is the author of At Night (AA Publishing), a book about night-time Britain that comes out on 21 June
