Life on and around the A12

My grandfather being a good storyteller recounted tales of the weird and wonderful he had read in the East Anglian Magazine, of which he had a whole collection of bound copies. One recurring theme was the 'Black Shuck', a huge spectral hound with glowing red eyes which was supposed to roam the highways and byways around parts of Suffolk. I would have been about 10 years old at the time and these accounts made quite an impression on me, and even later on during my brass rubbing adventures ol' Shuck seemed to be forever present in my imagination as I wandered alone down spooky lanes, with my brass rubbing equipment slung over my shoulder.

On leaving school after 'O' levels I joined, as a police cadet, the Suffolk Constabulary, into which my parents, feeling I needed a bit of discipline, more or less pushed me.
So I found myself at the age of 17 at the beginning of January 1969, in uniform, awaiting orders. The first six months were spent in Felixstowe and then I was posted to Lowestoft at the other end of the A12, and for this and future travels up and down the road I bought a scooter; a little, rather battered, Vespa.

Most weekends were spent in Lowestoft where I was housed in the single men's hall of residence, but on occasions I would return to Ipswich to be with the rest of the family, telling them stories of my new life as a 'policeman'. Travelling back to Lowestoft on Sunday evening in the late autumn dusk along the desolate A12 was not an experience I looked forward to. It was 1969 and the road was practically empty, and alone on that little scooter it could be quite a scary ride and I prayed I wouldn't break down. As I passed the turning to Yoxford and headed towards Blythburgh I relived the story I had read of the Black Shuck's visit to the church there in 1577, when he apparently killed two people who had taken refuge inside from a violent storm.

I served my time in the police and went looking for work elsewhere, ending up on a farm in Kesgrave near Woodbridge. I was out on the tractor a lot, sowing wheat, spreading silage for the cows, hoeing sugar beet and carting hay. The grass for hay making was grown on land owned by the farmer at a village called Little Bealings, a bit further up the A12, along a stretch of road so notorious for traffic accidents that it acquired the name 'The Murder Mile'. I would trundle along it on my tractor and trailer and never experienced any trouble there, although that was during the day.

There were what appeared to be some sensitive installations in the area around the farm and one such, bristling with antennae, masts and dishes, was next to the field I was hoeing, and I would take the tractor right up to the perimeter fence before turning round. I was not particularly interested in what might be going on inside though, as I assumed that these things were just there for the defence of the realm; it was the 'Cold War' after all.

After a stint at the Tollemache brewery down by the river in Ipswich, and a two-year art foundation course at the Ipswich School of Art, I left Suffolk for a three-year degree course in Fine Art Sculpture at Stourbridge, in Worcestershire.

On completion of the course I returned to Suffolk, took and passed the HGV licence and found work driving lorries carting asphalt for the A12 Wickham Market by-pass. This lasted from October 1975 to the culmination of the project and the opening of the bypass in August 1976.

It was a long hot summer and the construction company, wanting to make the most of the exceptional weather, had kept the machinery working for most of the daylight hours, which meant I was running backwards and forwards to the site for sometimes twelve hours a day. Long breaks would come though when the spreader needed maintenance or repair and we would all sit around and chat, and I would play a few tunes on my mandolin, draw portraits, and take the metal detector I had bought up on the thrown-up earth banks to hunt for Roman coins and the like. I was never bored.

I had been very impressed by the performance of the Renault 4s the construction company engineers used to run around the site in, and with the money I had been able to save I bought a second-hand one off some guy in Ipswich and took it with me down to Brighton, where I had got onto a year's teacher training course at what is now the University of East Sussex.

By 1978 I had settled down into a permanent teaching job in London, and on occasion would run up the A12 to Suffolk to revisit the places where I used to work, and of course to the 'Tree' in Rendlesham Forest.

The story leading to my extended study of the 'Tree' is a rather convoluted one and strangely enough my continuing investigations into what happened there, and my crop circle adventures, all came about thanks to my brass rubbing hobby, and a chance meeting in 1984 with a team of archaeologists excavating a Templar site in La Rochelle, France.

These people had uncovered a large medieval incised slab cut in Tournai marble, a really important find, and I introduced myself and offered to do a rubbing of it for them. They were not familiar with the process so I showed them some of the rubbings I had done as a boy in and around Suffolk, and they were very impressed, and asked me whether I would like to exhibit them in an exhibition they had planned for the Templar site excavation finds. I agreed and the exhibition went ahead in 1986, in the Grosse Horloge in La Rochelle. We produced a booklet giving the history of each brass on display, these being almost exclusively knights in armour, and at the close of the exhibition the following year I was left with several unsold copies of the book.

Ten years later, in 1996, I was back in La Rochelle and just as before was out and about in the town when I passed a little bookshop which had a display of medieval swords in the window. It was a sort of what you would call 'esoteric' bookshop, and I went in and asked the owner whether she would be interested in selling the remainder of the books left over from the exhibition. She agreed and put them on display.

A year later I returned to the bookshop and got chatting to other people in there and I came to understand that this 'Librairie ésotérique' had become a bit of a meeting place for all people interested in things 'paranormal' and the like. One day when I was there I got into conversation with a guy who ran the local UFO Association, and rather like I had introduced the Templar archaeologists to brass rubbing 10 years earlier, I now found myself telling this guy about crop circles.

The response was almost a carbon copy of the last time, totally amazed and impressed to the point where, once again, my participation was sought and I was asked to give a talk on the subject to his association members, and the public. This set me on the crop circle research path and from here I went on to give several conferences in Nantes, where in 2002 I was introduced to Anne, who asked me whether I would be interested in showing my research on a website she was starting up to cover the subject. I agreed and she got the site ready for the coming 2003 season. In November 2002 I came across the Tree in Rendlesham Forest so this was actually the beginning of our collaboration concerning crop circles.

It can thus be argued that thanks to a childhood hobby we now have the crop circle research as presented in Culture-crop.

As a point of interest, La Rochelle was under English rule during the middle ages (Eleanor of Aquitaine) and was the main source of salt and wine exports destined for England, often to the North Sea port of Dunwich (now sadly long since swallowed up by the sea) just north of Orford on the Suffolk coast. Dunwich was, at the time, a thriving centre for maritime trade.