Last time I stayed at the Jolly Sailor it was a rickety building standing on a higgledy-piggledy quay in a disorder of scruffy little fishing boats pulled up onto the mud, amid tangled ropes and lobster pots.

When we revisited it recently it had moved into another century and appeared to have moved inland and had sprouted a large car park, albeit below sea level, the whole protected by a sea wall. There were no fishermen, nor even firefighters, singing sea shanties and playing fiddles in the heaving public bar. I felt sure it was the same pub as the bar seemed right. No one could help me. No one remembered.

The mere was familiar but it was blowing a gale and the rigging of the little pleasure boats shrieked like a manic celestial harp or a skein of hysterical geese. From the sea wall we could see the castle and the church so we went to investigate.

The 12th century castle looks new due to recent rendering with tinted lime mortar to protect its crumbling stonework. “The ramparts have been reduced to lurching waves of grassy ditch and hummock,” said the Readers Digest book in the bar.

The pretty village is manicured and painted with Farrow and Ball Sardine but that is where the fishiness ends.

Gone is the smoker’s shack by the water where kippers, pigeons, oysters and eels hung, filling the air with a delicious miasma. There is a very clean deli on the new quay but it was closed.

Exploring the churchyard,

I warm to the little man who guards the mediaeval font in St Bartholomew’s church, Orford.

I missed the singing and the good humour of my last visit, but not the food poisoning from the smokery on the mud!