Nashoba, Base Green, near Wetherden, Suffolk

Just two days on and we have spent them productively, this morning Chris polishing the caravan in readiness for storage and I cleaning the oven and hob to a state marginally improved from what it was; I am a poor housekeeper. We have enjoyed yet another day of good weather and warmer temperatures, all part of the build up to a cyclone coming up from the Atlantic offering unseasonably good weather; an oxymoron surely?

Yesterday after washing and drying our entire bedding at our favoured laundry in Bury St Edmunds, again in preparation for storage, we headed out to Ickworth House, that National Trust property now a regular on our local attractions list, with a view to walking for both exercise and the joy of autumn leaves. 

After lunch we set off down past the church and through the walled garden where we were delighted to see the last of the wild flowers and a splendid display of dahlias, down to the river and around via the woods; an hour long walk now familiar. Alas many of the fine trees about the estate are oaks and are still a little way off reacting to the cooler autumn weather. But we did find several sweet chestnut trees and filled our pockets with the brown nuts, peeling away the partly split prickly cases with sticks in each hand, as we had at Sutton Hoo. Later we filled two jars with snacking nuts and half a bread bag to take with us to Chris’s sister when we went for dinner later in the afternoon.

Today after our morning tasks were completed, we drove into the local village of Haughley, not the nearest to us but that we pass through every time we head back into Stowmarket. Last night Margie had told us that Haughley was the largest market town in the area prior to Stowmarket taking over the role. Given that she has much local knowledge and has lived in the area all of her life, longer than ours, we were not so rude to poohoo our hostess, but did wonder if she was strictly correct.

Over lunch we pulled out an excellent little book on Suffolk villages she lent us last year and found there did seem to be some truth in her tale after all, along with other little gems that led us to head in and explore Haughley further. Up until then we knew Haughley to be where our niece had run a pub and a muddle of streets to navigate to and from our camp, although we had noticed the charming pastel shades of the period houses. 

Today we spent some time wandering about after buying the weekend paper at the Co-op Store, checking out the church in search of the reported moat. We found the village to be far more extensive than previously thought, with a wealth of delightful buildings and a far more extensive history that we could ever have imagined.

Haughley, aka forty other spellings through the ages including Hawleigh and “Hageneth”, an old name for the castle, developed within the outer bailey of a Norman Castle,  a wooden structure now long gone. The site was already an important settlement in Anglo-Saxon times, but with the Conquest in 1066 came the elevation to the “Honour” of Haughley, this denoting it as a royal estate of some importance. William the Conqueror awarded the manor to Hugh de Montford, whose name has popped up in this region before. It remained “a manor in the gift of the monarch” until the 19^th century, and has had a variety of “Lords”, some drawn from royalty, others from such notable families as the Uffords, de la Poles and Sulyards, although I had heard of the last. Haughley still has a resident Lord of the Manor.

The castle was attacked in 1173 by the Earl of Leicester with a force of Flemish mercenaries during a rebellion against Henry II. Edward II stayed here during Christmas 1326, but by the late Middle Ages the castle had fallen into disuse. Today only the earthworks remain on the privately owned, protected site. It was these we saw as we walked out into the field behind the churchyard, the elevated motte, home to three cedars and the deep moat home to a few ducks.

The Church of St Mary the Virgin has overseen the history of the place from way-back-when, the South tower built about 1200 containing five bells which date back to the medieval period. In 1231 Henry III grated a charter to hold a market here and annual Peddlers Fairs were held until 1871 when there was an end to such fairs due to “riotous” behaviour.

However Haughley’s heydays declined after a fire in the early 1700s destroyed much of the area around the church. Even with the coming of the rail and the construction of the important Haughley Junction on the outskirts of the village, there was a gradual shift away from Haughley. This was primarily a farming community until the mid-1900s, largely self-sufficient and home to a variety of trades. Even today, there are a surprising number of local businesses, including the pub, an Indian restaurant (we may patronise this before we leave Suffolk), the Co-op store, a hairdresser, a Post Office which seems to have rather limited opening hours, the odd combination of furniture and shoe repair shop, a baker and apparently several bed and breakfast operations. There is also a primary school and sports field, the latter offering recycling, to where a bag of surplus clothing has found its way.    

So you see there is much to Haughley after all, and we should have realised that before; it does have a population of about 1,700.

After this dose of history, we headed south of the A14 to Bradfield Wood, the coppice woods we visited back on 21 June, a fact duly recorded earlier in this blog. Today we wanted to walk through the autumn version of the eighty one hectare reserve, and were duly rewarded. As we shuffled through the deep autumn leaves, we startled pheasants and grey squirrels, the latter scuttling away and up into the trees. We spotted nests, large and small, high up in the trees, some already skeletal with their winter form. Today we took the two and a half mile trail to the western edge of the wood, from where we had lovely views across the newly ploughed fields, the farmhouses distant and flocks of crows and pigeons scavenging for seed or insects.

We returned through a series of villages; Bradfield St George, Kingshall Street and Hessett, this latter with a number of beautifully decorative plastered houses. By now the clouds had cleared away and we spent the rest of the day spoilt with bright sunshine.