Suffolk and Bury St Edmund's

Suffolk is magnificent. This is the deep England of time immemorial, of fields and hedges and half-timbered houses and medieval parish churches, unfurling like a tapestry. Behind lurk older, darker memories, from the Viking sagas and buried ship at Sutton Hoo and lost city of Dunwich, now deep beneath the waves. If any one county can epitomise the essence of old England - deep countryside, splendid castles and a maritime coast too - Suffolk surely excels.

Yet few overseas tourists seem to come here. Distracted by the glamour of London, most will venture north-east to the spires and sublime waterways of Cambridge, and stop short at the fens. The half-timbered English country cottages of Lavenham appeal to some. Yet there is no "destination city" in Suffolk to rival Oxford or Cambridge, though some would argue that the splendid cathedral city of Bury St. Edmunds comes close. Ipswich, Suffolk's capital, is a major industrial city with all the virtues and vices that implies.

Yet to miss Suffolk is to miss out on the beating heart of old England, a hundred miles away from the suffocating density and churn of the south east. Suffolk is a county with no motorways but plenty of waterways, with little metropolitan chic but with deep history and beauty of a timeless England. This hub reveals the highlights of England's secret heartland and starts with a sublime cathedral city - the lost Abbey of Bury St Edmunds.

Bury St Edmunds is a picturesque and quintessentially English market town and formerly the county town of West Suffolk. Today a stroll around its romantic Abbey Gardens, a frequent prize-winner in Britain in Bloom competitions, provides a uniquely evocative window into the country's lost monastic past. Days out in Suffolk come no better than this.

The Abbey Gate today stands tall and imposing, a fourteenth century structure built for giants and vastly out of scale with the gardens and modest cathedral of St Edmundsbury that lie beyond. It is a doorway to a vanished world. For this gate once led into the Great Square of the mammoth Benedictine Abbey of St Edmunds that once stood here for centuries.

Walk on through the beautiful sunken gardens and you start to notice that this is no ordinary floral display. Founded around the shrine to martyred King Edmund, the heroic victim of the Danes, this site has been a holy place of pilgrimage for centuries. Peering out from the near-distance beyond, looms the beautiful cathedral of St Edmundsbury. And all around are gigantic ruins - overgrown with moss, huge stone pillars and buttresses that only support thin air.

Suddenly it dawns on you that you are actually standing in the midst of the vast ruins of the Abbey, one of the largest medieval monasteries in Europe and an entire city of soaring towers and pinnacles. The main Abbey building was 505 feet (153 metres) long and spanned 246 feet (74 metres) across its transept, and itself was the hub of a cacophony of halls, towers and outbuildings.The sheer scale is astounding. The largest parish church in Suffolk - at Lavenham - could have fitted into the nave more than four times over.This was the power of the medieval church at its most massive and overbearing. Thousands would have lived, prayed and toiled in the great Abbey and its three breweries.

The fortunes of the Abbey waxed and waned over the centuries. The Abbey Gate was itself destroyed by rebellious townsfolk in 1327, angry at the power of the monks and their incessant fiscal demands. Over three whole days of riots, the Abbey was occupied and attacked by the rioters. Then a calamitous fire swept the Abbey complex on 20 January 1465 and the great tower and spire tumbled to the ground. It is unlikely that the buildings ever regained their former glory.

All of this rich monastic legacy was finally swept away by the Reformation, and this great Benedictine Abbey - this miniature city that surrounded the ancient building - was torn down in 1539. The modern cathedral, itself an imposing and historic edifice, was originally just plain St. James' church, one of many little satellite churches that surrounded the great Abbey itself. Nearby the twelfth-century Norman Gate still stands, alone like a shipwreck from a vanished age washed up on modern shores. A further walk takes down you to St. Mary's Church, a magnificent parish church that was once just one of the many outbuildings wedged against the Abbey walls.

Sometimes the scale of what we have lost outweighs the scraps of history that survives. The ruins of St Edmund's Abbey, just as dramatic in their own way as the Roman forum, are a reminder of the power of time and the transience of all human greatness.