Nashoba, Base Green, Suffolk

     

There is still no immediate plan for us to move on, a frustration on some levels, but we are glad to avail ourselves to the needs of our English family, something generally impossible from the other side of the world. Last week we provided transport and companionship for Chris’s sister when she attended an eye appointment at the West Suffolk Hospital and now we are waiting for confirmation of her new tenancy so Chris can make a start on the redecoration before she moves in. This is all rather strange to us, especially as landlords ourselves, who are always responsible to undertake the decoration and maintenance of any property we make available for a tenant. Here it seems the tenant makes these changes and upgrades on their own account, although I do wonder if there is some miscommunication going on here. No matter, this is where we are for now.

Since last weekend’s wet weather, we have enjoyed several dry and pleasant days, and made the most of the time which would be otherwise idle.

One day we headed off to Ickworth the other side of Bury St Edmunds, one of our much visited and favourite National Trust properties. We were keen to undertake a significant walk, and this we did after picnicking in the car. For all the times we have walked about the estate, we had not walked up to the northern reach of the property, the most elevated mixed woodland and farm area, part of The Grand Tour which if walked or cycled in its entirety, is 6.4 kilometre long; the section we did was probably about two thirds of that and took us two hours, taking us up to the Monument dedicated to the memory of Frederick Hervey, Earl of Bristol, Bishop of Derry (1730 – 1803).

This character was one of the more eccentric members of the Hervey’s of Ickworth, the younger brother of the obvious heir to the title, studying law then joining the church, such a popular career path those who miss out on inheriting the mana and wealth of aristocratic property. Frederick became a royal chaplain to George III, thus remaining in the upper circles of society, and became the Bishop of Derry, known as the Earl-Bishop after he inherited the earldom from his brother in 1779. It was he who conceived and started the construction of Ickworth House in 1795. He was an ardent supporter of Catholic Emancipation which went against contemporary thought, and for this it was the folk of his diocese who raised funds to erect the obelisk that stand on the top of the hill within view of Ickworth House. 

We were disappointed that we had missed the spring blooms that we have encountered in the past here at Ickworth, although here as all about the county, the hawthorns are heavily bent with their veils of tiny white flowers, and the horse chestnuts are a mass of flowers. Young lambs were well settled into their public National Trust life; they showed little fear as we passed by.

The next day we set off to Combs, just the other side of Stowmarket, and walked for three hours following a network of public walkways across arable farmland, through ancient woods and past old Halls and Churches. The sun was hot, and shone brilliantly onto the golden rape crops, and along the edges the nettles grew lush and green. At one point we became lost, missing the trail sign and spent some time bushwhacking our way through brambles, hawthorne and rape on three sides of a large cropped field, before finding our way through a hedge onto the track we should have remained on. As we battled our way along the edge of the crop, we suddenly came upon the cannon sized barrel of a bird scarer gun which gave us quite a fright, although it would have given us much more of one had it gone off at that very moment.

We lunched on a pile of cut logs in one spinney, and on rising from our rest, spotted a Muntjac deer a little distance away. That, and the one squirrel we had spotted at Ickworth the day before, made for the only UK wildlife spotted so far this year.  

Our walk took us past farms named Holyoak and Pennyplot, Halls named Halfpenny, Combs and Badley and churches at Badley and Combs both named St Mary’s. Establishment of the farm houses and Halls date back to the 16^th century and the one church open to the public, or at least, to us, Combs St Mary’s has an honour board of Rectors which shows the first taking office in 1258.

We enjoyed views back over the western section of Stowmarket and northern views over the wide Gipping Valley. At one point we walked up a ride passing through Combs Wood, once belonging to the lords of the manor of Combs, now managed by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. Here dogs are not allowed, but elsewhere they cannot be excluded from the UK walkers’ experience. Notices attached to trees request that owners collect up the calling cards of their canine companions and keep their charges on leads, and yet we saw small dogs gambolling across the newly sown crops, their owners having no regard to the damage being caused. I have said it before and will say it again; English people are potty about their dogs. 

Today after popping into Stowmarket in the morning to attend to our laundry and re-provisioning our pantry and fridge, we decided to make the most of the sunny day; we headed out after lunch south across the charming countryside to Lavenham, a half hour drive passing through the delightful villages of Buxhall and Brettenham to one of the United Kingdom’s most beautiful medieval villages, or at least Suffolk’s. In fact the charm of lovely Lavenham draws the tourist in and today, even though it lies in the middle of a wealthy farming area, surely relies mostly on the tourist trade. In March 2015 when we wandered extensively around the compact village, we were unable to access the lime washed Guild Hall of Corpus Christi, a sixteenth century National Trust building. 

The town was built on the back of the cloth industry, as was the nearby Bury St Edmunds and Sudbury, and was once the 14^th richest town in England. Since the 1300s it had specialised in weaving woollen cloth. A century later, wealthy merchants controlled exports of this cloth and built their houses, guildhalls and church in grand style. A recession hit in the early 1500s and the rich merchants left, but subsequent generations of craftspeople sustained the struggling cloth industry and it was not until 300 years later that the townsfolk were able to afford to update their medieval town.

The Guildhall has had a long and varied life, all of which is well spelled out over the two floors of the building. It was erected in about 1530 as a meeting place and a place where Catholic religious guilds hired priests to pray for the souls of their members, both the living and the dead.

Before 1655 the Hall was used as a prison or in the language of the time, a “bridewell”. After then, it was used as a workhouse caring for orphans, the poor, infirm and elderly of the parish. The inmates were provided with food, shelter and education in return for work, spinning hemp, flax, and yarn, and weaving coconut fibre from India and Ceylon into mats and horse hair into upholstery fabrics.

Years later, between 1813 and 1839, a school was operated in the Hall, then later it was converted to alms houses and a grain store, then later again a chapel for the Primitive Methodists.

In 1887, public spirited Cuthbert Quilter restored the Guildhall range for the community. Quilter was an art collector, politician and philanthropist and forty six years old when he came to the rescue of the Lavenham Guildhall. He was one of the founding directors of the National Telephone Company (registered in 1881) and continued as a director and large shareholder for the remainder of his life, suggesting a rather forward thinking man. He was an agriculturalist adept at cattle breeding, a Justice of the Peace and an alderman of the West Suffolk county council, amongst many other achievements and milestones. Thus he was the ideal person to step in to save the Guildhall.

Much later, during the Second World War, parts of the Guildhall became a British restaurant, bathhouse and nursery, serving as a social centre and provider of meals for evacuees from London, It also hosted entertainment for foreign airmen.

Then finally in 1951, the Guildhall’s local trustees asked the National Trust to manage it for the benefit of the people of Lavenham, thus ending a rather long and odd history.

There was also an exhibition in one of the upper rooms about the talented Taylor family, writers and illustrators who settled in the village after moving from London and Colchester. Daughter Jane (1783 – 1824) is credited with writing the famous nursery rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”, one of those little treasures of information that one discovers when travelling.

We arrived back at camp, in time to rescue the washing before any suggestion of evening dew and to catch our host Ivan, to pay for a further week. We learned that this little Certified Site will be very busy over this coming weekend, and will surely be even busier the following, with it being the second of the May Bank Holidays. It is unlikely we will have managed to get away because we have yet to receive word about Margie having firmly secured her new home in Elmswell.