You won't find it marked on mariner's charts or walker's maps, but the amber coast lies 
  between Felixstowe and Southwold.  This stretch of the Sandlings has a very special 
  distinction.  Ever since Britain became an island at the close of the last glaciation, it has 
  been the recipient of amber, a beautiful, random gift from the cold North Sea.  Amber 
  is just resin - the sticky stuff that glues your fingers when you prune the Christmas tree 
  - but it's fossilised resin, and forty million years old.  When polished it seems to hold the 
  rays of the sun, and glows with internal fire.  Magically, it often encapsulates evidence of 
  a lost world never seen by man.

  Polished Amber with Insects

An immense forest once grew in the region now occupied by the Baltic Sea, and that is the
source of the amber on Suffolk's beaches.  The amber forest evolved, flourished and then
passed into history tens of millions of years after the last of dinosaurs.  A wide variety of
birds and mammals lived in the forest, although the branch of the mammalian tree of which
we are one of the outermost twigs had yet to produce the common ancestor of ourselves 
and monkeys.  Invertebrates - especially insects - were as diverse and abundant as they 
are today, and they exploited every ecological niche in the forest.  Every storm and fire in 
the forest caused damage to the trees, and countless glistening streams of syrupy resin 
oozed down the damaged trunks and disappeared into the fallen pine needles.

       Raw Amber on the Beach

Buried in soil and later subjected to immense pressure for millions of years, the resin eventually fossilised into amber.  Embalmed 
within, and perfectly preserved, is everything it came into contact with.  Grinding ice sheets scooped up the amber and carried it 
westwards before dropping it to the bottom of the new sea that separated Britain from the continent.  

East coast fishermen have netted large pieces of amber from the seabed for centuries.  If you visit Shingle Street, Aldeburgh or 
Southwold, this could be your lucky day.