Nashoba, Base Green, near Wetherden, Suffolk

A few more days of cleaning and catching up with relatives; none very intense and most commenced with a very leisurely rising. Our host is still pottering about planting his hedge which hopefully will offer more privacy from the road for future campers; however the road through to Wetherden from Haughley is hardly a highway. I was horrified to discover he was planting privet, the bane of our life back on our section in New Zealand. We spend so much time cutting back and poisoning this dreadful weed which when mature and flowering throughout the summer causes so much distress to asthma sufferers, and here is Ivan nurturing these demon plants. We have learned that the fields to our east, covered in a lush long leafed crop, is in fact a fuel crop, elephant grass to be converted into bio-fuel. This is not the first time we have come across this; it seems that the future of farming is either in solar panels or crops for bio-fuel. I am not sure where Britain will source its food from in the future; maybe we DownUnder will be called once more to be the food basket of the old Empire?

One afternoon we walked part of the River Gipping River path, that portion between Stowmarket and Needham Market previously neglected. Our plan was to walk down river from the Stow railway station to that point we had reached from Needham Market, which we would hopefully recognise.  We could not agree where that was, even revisiting several options, however I did concede that we had reached Bradley Lock, and so with that we also agreed we had now walked the full four miles between the two towns.

The western reach of this seventeen mile walk which ends down in the docklands of Ipswich, passes two large industrial sites so very important to the economy of Stowmarket. The first is a paint factory which gave itself away when we spotted the great pallet piles of Dulux paint pails, however nothing had forewarned us of the extent of the operation. 

The Stowmarket gun cotton works was built in 1863 beside the River Gipping, but completely destroyed in an explosion in 1871, a disaster that killed twenty four people and injured seventy five, a disaster that was reported as far away as America and Australia. The names of those who lost their lives are listed on a board outside the current factory, and include a number of boys and girls aged between twelve and sixteen years old.

The works was rebuilt within a couple of years, and in 1880 the New Explosives Company took the business over, extending the factory and imaginatively renaming the  company the New Explosives Co. Ltd. Expansion continued, including a new Cordite company, all of which caused the same health problems as those we learned about war-time munitions operations in Leeds.

In 1907, the works had been acquired by Nobel’s Explosives, that founded by Alfred Nobel who had invented dynamite in 1867 and designed other revolutionary items such as the blasting cap and gelignite; what a guy! And yes, during the war, women worked in the factory, a life of dubious independence. But after the war, the factory was turned over to the manufacture of industrial lacquer, and the name changed to Necol Industrial Collodions Ltd, heralding the birth of the paint business. 

In 1926 the site was bought by ICI, formed from a merger of four companies of diverse talents. And sixty six years later, ICI introduced the world’s first commercialised refinish waterborne paint system, the product developed by the Stowmarket team and awarded the highest official UK award for British business, the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement. The technical nature of that last sentence was greatly understood and appreciated by my husband who knows much about such matters.

In 1999 the site was sold yet again, this time to PPG Industries, the world’s largest coatings manufacturer, as part of a £425 million deal to buy the ICI Refinish business. Today PGG Stowmarket is one of the largest PPG sites in the world manufacturing refinish product for the car automotive industry, and is the town’s largest employer.

This we found all quite fascinating, and even more so were the security cameras watching a strip cleared of vegetation between the high fence and the site area. Perhaps they are checking on local wildlife movements as a philanthropic project to counter any negative impact on the river and the natural environment generally.

Further east is the Munton’s malting factory, where mainly locally grown grain is fed into the many kilns and turned into malt ingredients to be then distributed to microbreweries and breweries, and manufacturers of bakery and other food products. They have been doing this here in Stowmarket since 1921 and obviously provide employment for another large section of the local community.

Both Munton’s and PPG have done their best to beautify the section of the river path that follows their boundary, but the Gipping is sluggish for much of the section we walked this time, often struggling through a mass of reeds. We saw ducks and one variety of fish on and in the river, and one pheasant, a blackbird and a heron along the way, all far less than expectations raised by signage sponsored by the paint company. These advertised a multitude of insects, birds and plant life; I suspect we were here at the wrong time of the year. We sampled the late blackberries along the way and found them to be quite tasteless; that will teach me for such petty theft.    

Today we were more venturesome heading toward the Suffolk coast to Sutton Hoo, which for those for whom the bell does not toll, is a world celebrated archaeological site, where in 1939 a forty-oar burial ship of an Anglo-Saxon warrior king, packed with an amazing assortment of precious treasure, was dug out of one of the many “hillocks”, or more correctly, burial mounds.

The National Trust looks after the site, and has done since 1998. Here the tourist can visit the mounds, but only close-up with a guide on one of the two daily tours, otherwise having to be satisfied with a wander about the circuit and various interpretative boards. There is also a wonderful exhibition in a purpose built hall where the story of the content and the discovery is explained by film, story and replica objects and so much more. The extensive grounds offer a variety of walks and a visit to Tranmer House, home to the rather interesting Mrs Edith Perry who requested the dig in the first place. The house, named Sutton Hoo House from its build in 1910 through to being gifted to the Trust when it was renamed in honour of the donor, has since passed through a number of hands. The ground floor rooms open to the public are decorated in keeping with the decade of the Great Discovery and are absolutely lovely, and the upper floors are let out as holiday apartments.

The burial dates back to about the mid-7^th century and is believed to be that of Raedwald, King of East Anglia, although there is no absolute proof of this, however it is a burial only fit for a person of high status. It was interesting to learn what was happening elsewhere in the world about that time; that in 600 AD the city of Teotihuacan in Mexico had a population of 100,000, in 604 Buddhism was made the official religion in Japan, in 616 Egypt was taken from the Eastern Roman Empire by the Persians, in 618 the Tang dynasty was established in China and that in 632 Mohammed died. It was indeed a significant century. 

We had come upon the antiquities dug up in the British Museum, and similar history elsewhere although this one is rather special, but I was particularly interested and entertained by the story of the dig itself and those involved.

Edith Dempster had taken her time to marry her husband, Frank Pretty, mainly due to the fact her father did not entirely approve of her suitor, he whose family had acquired their wealth from the manufacture of corsets as opposed to his own grown from the distribution of gas. Both families were of the nouveau riche class but even then it seems there was a hierarchy. When she finally did accept his annual proposal after her father conveniently died, she was in her mid-thirties but still managed to produce one heir in her mid-forties.  By the time she engaged the rather clever but unlettered archaeologist Basil Brown to dig up one of the ancient mounds near her house, her husband had died of stomach cancer, as her son was to many years later.

Basil and two helpers, Edith’s gardener and another farm labourer, opened the first and soon realised they had been rich Anglo-Saxon graves, finding traces of a buried boat. Unfortunately both Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I had given free rein to gold diggers during their reign, hoping they might find gold to finance their royal coffers, and much treasure of past civilisations was lost during those years. These first three mounds had suffered the same fate.

In 1939, Brown opened the largest mound, and cutting a trench from east to west, discovered iron ship-rivets in the sand. Without removing them, he worked carefully, and gradually revealed the shape of a huge ship; the wood had rotted leaving only a stain. The 90 foot ship was an amazing sight but something more wonderful now appeared; the burial in the ship had not been looted. Unfortunately word got out and the “real archaeologists” arrived from Cambridge University, then the British Museum tried to call the shots, and so the bun fights began.

Fortunately, for the dig, the Second World War II intervened, diverting attention and putting the dig on hold. Edith also managed to win a case of ownership over the treasure, although she subsequently donated it to the British Museum and so to the public. 

Of course this is only a tiny snippet of the saga and a visit to Sutton Hoo will delight the visitor, as it did us, exceeding our expectations. We ended up spending five hours there and then didn’t have time to enjoy any of the walks through the woods and down toward the River Deben from where that boat must have once been dragged. We were too late to visit nearby Woodbridge or the nearby Orford Castle; otro dia, as they say.