Aldeburgh

September 2016

I first heard of housesitting through my brother and his partner, as an alternate way to spend time travelling and exploring places you might never think of going. They had had a wonderful experience with it, and soon recommended it to me as a cheap and effective means of travel.
Trusted Housesitters is the excellent website I use to find my house-sits,  and although somewhat costly, you quickly make up the membership fee by staying in places rent free!

My first experience housesitting was in the small sea town of Aldeburgh. I'd never heard of it before, and therefore would probably never have gone there if not for this opportunity, and I'm glad I did. The town itself was very cute, almost like a sea-side resort, but as I was there heading into Autumn, it was rather quiet - exactly how I like it. 

The land around the village was somewhat wild, and I often found myself startling rabbits out on my walks, or picking late blackberries off their thorny brambles while following meandering dirt tracks through the estuary. 

The owner of the house I was looking after was a lovely lady in her 70s who was going back and forth to London to visit friends and needed her cat taken care of. 

Her cat Saska was rather shy, but I kept bribing her with tuna until she liked me.

I soon realised I had been pronouncing the town name embarrassingly wrong (pronounced -old-burrow, not eldaberg as I had been attempting). It made more sense to me once I learned that the towns name originated from Alde Burgh, which once separated into two words actually means old fort, though it had long ago been lost to the sea along with much of the original town. 

One of the oldest buildings in town that still survives was the 'Moot Hall' (making me whimsically imagine Ents gathering for an ent-moot) which is still used for council meetings and has been for over 400 years! 

The last vestiges of summer were just fading and I managed to still get a few days in the sunshine, reading my books whilst lying on the beach and trying to ignore the stones digging into my back. I didn't end up swimming at all as the water was just too cold for me (though I did see one or two brave people do it!) but I did instead take up running, as I felt I really needed to get out of the house and do something! I quite enjoyed myself with the app 'couch to 5k' though I still haven't finished it and am eager to accomplish the elusive 5km without a break. 

There was something rather lovely about running on the footpath that ran alongside the beach, and in the early morning it was rather peaceful. I never did solve the mystery of the golden syrup smell that only ever occurred at 7:30 in the morning on one area of the beach though. I decided there must be secret tunnels beneath the sand where a sweet factory produced and smuggled lollies out to sea, because the smell was so strong (and only went on for ten minutes starting at 7:30AM!) that I couldn't think what else it could be!