Havergate Island is the only RSPB reserve you can't walk to. It sits in the middle of the River Ore between Orford and Orford Ness, reached by a twenty-minute boat trip from Orford Quay — and the reason to make the trip is that it's where the avocets first came back to breed in Britain after they'd been gone for a hundred years, where the brown hares outnumber the visitors on most days, and where you can spend an entire afternoon watching the tide and not see another walker on the path.
What's on Havergate Island
Havergate is 267 acres of brackish lagoons, reedbeds, mudflats, and sloping shingle, owned by the RSPB since 1948 and largely left to do what it does — no buildings on the island apart from a small visitor hide and a composting toilet at the jetty, and very little in the way of furniture beyond what the birds and the weather have arranged for themselves.
A single track runs around the edge of the lagoons, taking you past five hides spaced about twenty minutes apart on a flat surface that's gravel and shingle rather than anything paved, and a three-hour visit is the standard length — that's the shape the boat schedule gives it, and most people find it long enough to settle into one of the hides for half an hour without feeling rushed back toward the jetty.
What you'll see on Havergate
Avocets bred here for the first time in over a hundred years in 1947, and the reserve still holds one of the largest breeding colonies in the UK — around a hundred pairs in a good year, working the lagoons from mid-March through to August and putting on the kind of display that makes the early start worth the alarm. Sandwich and common terns nest on the shingle islands alongside them, and in June and July the hides at the south end of the reserve sit within thirty metres of the colonies, close enough that you can hear the calls without binoculars at all.
The brown hares are the surprise of the place. They were introduced in the 1920s and there's no fox population on the island to keep their numbers in check, so a dozen or more in three hours is normal, often in pairs, and March is when they box — standing on hind legs in the open, sparring with each other in a way that looks half-comic and half-serious from the path. Marsh harriers quarter the reedbeds all year long, in winter hen harriers come in over the dunes from somewhere out across the marshes, and the hard-frost weeks in January and February tend to bring short-eared owls hunting low across the shingle in the last hour of light.
How to get to Havergate Island
The RSPB run boat trips from Orford Quay between April and October, with the boat taking twelve passengers at a time and trips running two or three days a week through the season — though the exact dates do vary, and the RSPB website holds the calendar at least a fortnight ahead, so a look there will tell you what's running when. The crossing is twenty minutes each way and the boat returns at a fixed time, so it's worth being back at the jetty fifteen minutes before departure, with whatever time is left used for the walk back from the southern hides.
There's no other way to get on the island. Havergate sits in the navigation channel of the river, which means small private boats can't land there and kayaks aren't permitted either, so the RSPB boat from Orford Quay really is the only option — and that, as much as anything, is part of why the place stays as quiet as it does.
What to bring
Binoculars are the one thing you'll wish you hadn't left behind, and a scope helps if you have one to bring along, because the avocets and the terns feed in the middle distance rather than under your nose — close enough to see well, far enough that a bit of magnification turns a guess into a certainty. The hides have benches and viewing slots at adult height, so a cushion isn't a bad thing to tuck under your arm if you think you might settle into one of them for an hour at a time.
Boots tend to come out in spring and autumn, when the track has wet patches around the southern lagoon and the morning grass keeps everything damp until somewhere around midday; trail shoes work fine in summer, when the shingle dries out and the only mud left is in the corners. The wind off the North Sea cuts across the island even on warm days, so a windproof layer matters more than a fleece, and a hat is worth thinking about between October and April.
Lunch travels well in a backpack, and a little more than you think you'll need usually goes down well by the third hide, because there's no shop, no café, and no water tap on the island — a thermos of something warm is a welcome thing in February, and the phone signal is patchy in places, which is mostly a feature rather than a bug.
Combining Havergate with the rest of Orford
Orford itself is worth a half-day either side of the boat trip, with Pinney's of Orford for smoked fish that can either be eaten at the shed or wrapped up and taken back to the cottage, the Crown and Castle for lunch on a quieter midweek day, and Orford Castle for the view from the roof of ninety feet of Norman keep, with the whole estuary spread out below in a way that puts the boat trip into context.
Across the river from the village, the National Trust runs Orford Ness as a separate reserve, reached by their own ferry on a different ticket and a different boat — and the Ness, with its shingle and its Cold War wreckage and its sense of being almost off the edge of the country, deserves a full day to itself rather than being squeezed into the same trip as Havergate.
Staying near Havergate Island
Iken Barns sits fifteen minutes inland from Orford Quay, with five cottages on one site sleeping up to fourteen people between them, the Alde estuary at the bottom of the garden, and a lot of the same birdlife you'll see on the boat trip turning up on the doorstep in the early mornings — the kind of base that takes Havergate one day, the Sailors' Path to Aldeburgh another, and barely needs the car between either of them.
Check availability at ikenbarns.com.