In the bleak midwinter the striking Suffolk landscape takes centre stage

There’s a real wildness provided by the estuaries, and especially by the heath

If you’re a nature lover in winter, when not a lot of wildlife is on view, you can find yourself looking closely at the landscape instead, and I’ve been doing that over the holiday period.

The landscape I’ve been scrutinising is a lovely one, much appreciated by those who know it, but perhaps not all that familiar to the population as a whole. It’s the coastal heathlands of Suffolk, found in the strip of the county that extends from Lowestoft in the north down to Felixstowe in the south, although really concentrated in the middle, between the two resorts of Southwold and Aldeburgh.

It’s an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, meaning it’s one step short of a national park, and its official title is The Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB, but I prefer the old name for the area, which is the Sandlings, resonant of the sandy heathlands behind the shoreline which used to be intensively grazed by sheep.

Largely undeveloped, it has a remote feel, and I would hazard a guess that most people who come to it are drawn there initially by the two seaside towns, which are splendid. I found myself in the midst of it last week because I spent a few days with my family in Southwold, one of the most appealing places you will ever encounter, with its lighthouse, its towering 15th-century church, its sailors’ reading room, its ancient pubs and hotels and its wholly unspoiled main street, not to mention its long sandy beach fringed by pastel bathing huts.

Southwold has long had a whiff of the genteel about it, now overlaid with a definite whiff of the chic, but it has an enlivening whiff of the radical too. For example, on the side of the pier building there is a massive mural to George Orwell, a resident of the town in the 1930s, done by the graffiti artist Pure Evil (Charlie Uzzell-Edwards).

Even more radical are the pier’s wonderfully subversive slot machines designed by Tim Hunkin, which range from Mobility Masterclass (Can You Cross The Motorway Using The Zimmer Frame?) and Pirate Practice (Storm The Superyacht – Get Even With The Super-Rich!) to the sublime Whack-A-Banker, which is worth the trip to Southwold all by itself.

Aldeburgh is similarly alluring, handsome and genteel, and world famous for its music festival which Benjamin Britten founded, but it too has other attractions: two superlative fish-and-chip shops which had queues outside of 59 and 76 people respectively when I passed them on New Year’s Day lunchtime, and Maggie Hambling’s striking modern sculpture, Scallop, a tribute to Britten in the form of a giant stainless steel scallop shell which adorns the shingle beach, and which some of the locals hate, but which I was drawn to greatly.

Yet charming as these towns are, the landscape they enclose attracts me even more. The essence of the Sandlings is variety – it’s far from being just farmland. The different habitats comprising it include heather-covered heath, pine forest, reed bed, grazing marsh, muddy estuary, shingle beach and crumbling cliffs, and that variety is the key to the species-richness of the wildlife, so that Minsmere, the RSPB reserve which is at the heart of it and seems to sum it all up, has more than 100 species of breeding birds, the most of any British nature reserve.

We called in on Minsmere and it provided memorable wildlife glimpses, as always – flocks of teal were whistling in the wind and we startled a small herd of red deer hinds – but it was empty compared to the springtime, when the avocets are gracing the pools and the nightingales are singing their hearts out day as well as night in the woodlands. So I looked again at the countryside and tried to work out just what its appeal consisted in.

Being unspoiled coastline is a big part of it: no candyfloss on the clifftops here. The great East Anglian skies are another important feature. But most of all I think it is the hint of real wildness provided by the five sweeping estuaries of the area, and especially by the heaths, these ancient landscapes untouched by the plough: sweeping heather plateaus dotted with their gorse and their dark pines and their silver birches.

You could be in Russia. You could be in the distant past. You half expect Black Shuck, the local ghostly dog, to leap out at you.

Trudging back from Dunwich, the famous drowned village, over Dunwich Heath in the setting winter sun, it certainly felt like that, and I saw why the Sandlings of Suffolk constitute a part of southern England that is truly special.