Personal

Goodbye Ship Meadow

Behind my house - just the other side of Chapel Street - the land drops away into a small valley known as Ship Meadow. Local legend has it that a creek used to run down to the River Deben from here. Ships, it is said, would sail to the meadow on their final voyage before being dismantled and sold off piece by piece.

They say this is where the timber for my house came from.
They say it's what the cottage in this picture was built from.

Ship Meadow has been slowly eroded by modern houses, to the point that there's only one part of it left. And this week, the JCBs and Heras fencing have arrived to reclaim that space.

Until last year, the land in this picture was part of the garden of the blue shuttered cottage. An old man lives there (is it he who owns all the cats?), and his garden was always a source of envy. Stretching up to the road were rows of runner beans, potatoes and cabbage. If he wanted, he could have single-handedly put the greengrocer's stall on the market out of business.

But last spring the garden's most plentiful crop was bind weed, and before long a sign was erected declaring it would be uprooted for "The Master's House". The black fence appeared next, cutting the cottage off from its garden. The tide of progress is unstoppable.

Not that I'd want to stop it. Land use should evolve with the communities that surround it, but it's a defining moment of my time in Woodbridge: Ship Meadow will soon be nothing more than a name, a memory, a legend.