Suffolk 2019

Suffolk is a wonderful visit, an area off my radar for virtually the whole of my life, apart from the odd sortie to Woodbridge many years ago for family reasons, when I was a child, and a Christmas house party in the same estuary town with a crowd of fellow young people from my church. Then there was the odd couple of days in Southwold on a trip to Norfolk, posh resort with lots of signs as I remember.

But these were  coastal visits, detours off the main A12 arterial route from London to Norfolk. This time I wanted to strike into the interior of the county, get another slice of deepest England. I had read about the fine old towns and villages in sleepy Suffolk, with their pink, blue and yellow pastel cottages. Now it was time to check it out and lo and behold you do feel like you are in the very bosom of England as you traverse its gentle rolling countryside.

I took the direct route from the south coast, up the M23, round the M25 to Dartford, through the tunnel and then off the M25 onto the A12. Heading up the A12 on a Tuesday afternoon was hardly a song filled jaunt. I didn’t expect such a congested crawl out of London en route to what is after all a sparsely populated and very rural part of England. Surely not that many people live out this way! But congested it was, and by the time I left the main road in Colchester to take the road to Sudbury, the evening was drawing in. 

I’d chosen the Willowmere caravan and camping park from an internet search, situated on Bures Rd in the valley of the River Stour, on the southern outskirts of Sudbury, to pitch my tent, and what a good choice it was too. Neat, tidy and fall as a pancake, with spotless washroom facilities and cropped lawn, complete with picnic tables, it couldn’t have been a better choice. Here you can bring your caravan, motor caravan or tent. And it was quiet, really quiet, midweek before the main bank holiday weekend and with a mere smattering of occupied pitches. No queues for the showers, sinks and loos! I managed to exit the site just as the weekend crowd began to seep in. Glorious timing.

Sudbury looked a fine little market town on the river Stour and surrounded by water meadows, which made a great base for a three day visit. I’d never even heard of it before but enjoyed walking its rather expansive centre late at night, trying to spot seriously medieval wobbly houses, of which there were a few, part of the rich heritage introduced by Flemish weavers and wool merchants. Thomas Gainsborough the painter was a local luminary, and his birthplace is now a museum. Market Hill, virtually the centre of town, is filled with market stalls on Thursdays and Saturdays. There’s even a rail station, a terminus of a little branch line making Sudbury an evocative destination. Sadly, I didn’t get to see as much of Sudbury as it warranted, becoming better acquainted with Costa, Pizza Express and the Sainsbury’s cafe for breakfast or evening meal!

I have never seen so many wobbly blancmange houses anywhere else in the UK as in Suffolk. The rolling countryside conceals goodness knows how many towns and villages with groaning gables, skew angled corners, gravity defying extremities, every shade of pastel daub and timber framed medieval masterpieces, including one that was used as Harry Potters birthplace. So if you want your twenty first century ‘appreciation of fine straight lines’ head scrambled, wander the Suffolk lanes for a few days and marvel at the way they used to build, meandering through every possible permutation of vertical and horizontal building construction.

The town of Lavenham is just about top of the league for wobbly houses, with more medieval structures than you’d see in a sword and sorcery epic. You enter the town past the fine old church at the top of the hill, then dip down into a smorgasbord of merry old England. The town square is the icing on the cake, with its splendid white and grey timbered Guildhall and colourful hotch potch of ancient dwellings scattered around the square. 

Lavenham town square

Laven

Lavenham plumblines!

The Guildhall, ‘one of the finest timber framed buildings in Britain’ is now a National Trust museum with an easy to follow history tour including reports of how the authorities dealt with local ‘sturdy rogues’ who got in trouble with the law. Indeed part of the Guildhall was used to incarcerate ner do wells. The building has also been used as tenements for poor families, a workhouse and a meeting hall for the Corpus Christi Guild. And there’s a tearoom of course with outside space! 

Lavenham Guildhall

Lavenham Town Square

Yards away is Little Hall, a honey coloured half timbered affair advertised as a unique family home and lauded by Simon Jenkins as one of England’s thousand best houses. It would be no surprise if the gingerbread man and his family stepped out the front door, such was its excess of quaintness. It was built in the 14th century for a family of clothiers, improved in the 15th century, and then modernised in Tudor times with fireplace, upper floor over the central hall and also glazed windows. The house was rescued by the Gayer Anderson twin brothers in the inter war years, restoring the house and making it their home. After all that I never got to visit it! Incidentally don’t you dare step into the town square unless you arrive in a classic Triumph sporting a cravat and flat cap!

Gingerbread man's house?

Lavenham street

One evening I stumbled upon a footpath out of town across the fields and ventured forth for a while. A local told me that it’s the done thing to take this route to a pub somewhere across the fields and return after suitable refreshment. How civilised. 

Long Melford is a few miles down the road from Lavenham, just down from Melford Hall, a fine old stately home and National Trust property. Long Melford by name and nature, it must be one of the longest high streets in the country, especially if you walk it as I did from the Melford Hall end of the village. Here one gets the feeling of already being on a  country estate whilst still on the main road. A fine Suffolk church sits on top of the hill, and from its skirts sweeping common land bordered by a line of settlement on one side and the wall of Melford Hall on the other, siphons down to the village which hugs both sides of the main A134 road.

Long Melford

Melford Hall has been in the Hyde Parker family since 1786 and they still reside in one wing of the house. The site goes back a lot further than that, as in most of England you’re standing on hundreds if not thousands of years of history. The Abbotts of Edmunsbury got here first and used the site between 1000 and 1500. Once you’ve passed through the gate lodge and parked up you can pretend to be an aristocrat by walking up the driveway and being tempted to divert your route to the incredibly civilised looking tables and chairs of the cafe scattered over the lawn and nestled comfortably alongside the house. Otherwise you can swing round to face the front of the house with its two symmetrical wings and head straight for the entrance, do the tour and run out of time to do the cafe as I did. Of interest to some might be the tales of naval adventures on the high 

seas, pictures by Beatrix Potter in the nursery and the original Jemima Puddle duck toy.

Melford Hall itself had a serous fire in the Second World War which seems to have started during a party involving servicemen. It’s all a bit hush hush but evidently the fire was started from a bit of laxity from the military to the extent that the 100 year rule of keeping the files secret has been applied to the event to protect the families of those involved in any misdemeanour. Another interesting anecdote was the story of the Luftwaffe pilot who used Melford Hall as a landmark in the Second World War when flying over for bombing raids. Years later he visited the hall because he wanted to see what he had seen from the air for himself.

Bury St Edmunds is a town I had never visited before it being somewhat off the beaten track, but it was well worth it. A favourite of Charles Dickens, it proved to be an ideal place to film a costume drama with its cobbled thoroughfares, abbey ruins, cathedral and numerous assorted further wobbly constructions. Driving into the town on a pleasant summer’s evening I found myself transported back in time in the main square, a handsome affair bordered on the one side by the very hostelry that used to accommodate Charles Dickens, an ivy clad coach and horses type building, and on the other by an arch which gives access to the abbey gardens, a very pleasant park containing the ruins of the 11th century abbey of St Edmund. This area is classic old England, with St Edmundsbury cathedral as well to admire just adjacent to the abbey gardens. The cathedral was once part of the great abbey of St Edmunds, one of the richest and most powerful Benedictine monasteries in England.

St Edmundsbury Cathedral

Bury St Edmunds

Bury St Edmonds is a feast for the history buff. You can wander its genteel streets and admire the  timeless old English feel of the place, although I was brought down to earth with a bump when accosted by a homeless young man for money. Homelessness is a present scourge on the UK, reflecting perhaps a more fractured and sick society. I am familiar with the south coast, places like Brighton where there have been many homeless people. Now you find them in salubrious suburbs and well to do tourist honeypots like Windsor and Bury St Edmunds. I offered to buy said gentleman something to eat, but when I returned from McDonalds with burger and fries he had disappeared into thin air. I wandered around the town centre for a few minutes looking for him without success. I guess I appeared like a homeless person myself as a man asked me if I was alright. I explained what had happened and ate the food myself in the end. I still had room for a proper sit down meal at the local Thai restaurant.

Just a few miles out of town is Ickworth House, another expansive Italianate National Trust property well worth a visit. It sits in vast grounds and seemed to have sucked up half the local population into its bucolic bosom, whether wandering the grounds and deer park, touring the house or even visiting the hotel and enjoying the tea rooms. It’s a pretty impressive pile, with a central rotunda and two large wings thrown out to either side, one of which houses the hotel. 

Curves of Ickworth House

There is a great walk out the back of the mansion through the gentle gradients of the Suffolk countryside to the St. Mary’s estate church and then on down to the kitchen garden which sits on the edge of the local river Linnet. Meanwhile the house visit has a great servants quarters in the basement area, possibly the best I have seen in an English house with Workshop, mocked up Senior Servants’ room, Servants’ bedroom, Hall Boys rooms, Finishing Kitchen and storage areas, etc. set off great corridors. Once you’ve done below stairs, you work your way up through the house to the serious art and furniture sections. I ended up there rather too close to closing time so did a quick reccy before descending the stairs back to the courtyard. 

Now how about a diversion to Kersey, which has been considered one of England’s ten best villages, and at the centre of an area known as the wool towns. It comprises one main street that loops down from the church at the top of the hill, through a ford at the bottom, then up through an extreme concentration of mediaeval dwellings using most pleasing pastel shades to the top of the hill at the other end. A great way to see Suffolk in miniature. The Bell Inn is as rustically ancient as they come, has a great beer garden and does a brilliant ploughman’s lunch which I greatly enjoyed. Kersey would be a wonderful start and finish to a walking or cycling trip in my humble opinion.

Kersey colour

Kersey plus ford

No visit to Suffolk would be complete without a visit to Flatford and Willie Lott’s house, scene of Constable’s famous painting and now a National Trust site. I did it en route home, with a small diversion off our beloved A12. Once you’ve parked up, you walk down to the river where there is a   light and airy tea room on the riverbank. Why not just stop there and watch the river go by over a cuppa and return to your car? Alternatively you can walk down to the site of the famous scene and admire what Constable saw in the 19th century at Flatford Mill and Willie Lott’s house. There’s also an exhibition of Constable’s paintings. You can even hire a rowing boat and meander down the Stour, or simply take a riverside walk. Suffolk definitely hits the sweet spot if you want a good solid dollop of England. 

Willy Lott's house