Suffolk Nikolaus Pevsner, Enid Radcliffe

In this agricultural county of East Anglia, "scenery and buildings are a delight", wrote Pevsner. Numerous medieval houses and magnificent flint-faced churches with fine roofs and rich furnishings bear witness to the prosperity brought by the late medieval cloth trade. Castles are nobly represented by the unusual polygonal keep of Orford and the curtain-walled Framlingham, and great houses by a notable sequence of brick buildings of the sixteenth century. Among the coastal settlements are the lost town of Dunwich and picturesque Southwold; the varied inland towns range from Lavenham, remarkable for its exceptionally well preserved timber-framed buildings, to Bury St Edmunds, where fine Georgian houses are gathered around the precinct of the vast Norman abbey.