Chertsey Club Site, Surrey

Our second to last day in Suffolk started fraught with tension and frustration; we spent two hours securing a booking beyond Chertsey, down in the New Forest. After leaving unanswered messages, we eventually finalised arrangements for accommodation in Hampshire and then set to organising ferry tickets for the Isle of Wright. When we did manage to co-ordinate arrival and departure dates, still not supported by accommodation on the island, we realised the prices suggested in earlier investigation were for one way only. We abandoned our plans and decided we would consider the excursion later in the year when the prices and availability might be a little less. We also abandoned efforts to plan beyond; I struggled to set up the required internet payment and threw my hands up in frustration.

Alongside that was the simple operation of topping up our cellphones which caused no end of problems. After we finally managed the top up on the provider’s app, Vodafone took it upon themselves to upgrade Chris’s £10 package to a very generous £30 data package, and immediately deleted his credit balance by that amount without a moment of consultation.  All I can say is that Chris’s annual quota of the F-word usage has all been used up in the last couple of days. I persevered through the series of telephone voice option levels to cancel the plan, but still left it in place for the next month and reduced him to a usage-only plan for the months forward.

Our day’s planned activities were abandoned (“abandoned” was soon becoming the Word of the Day apart from that other) and we headed into Bury St Edmunds, the location of the closest Vodafone shop front. There a very beautiful Lithuanian confessed that their abilities were limited, but gave us a landline number which took us through to a real person in the complaints department, who soon pacified my irate husband.

The afternoon was passed in a more cheerful manner; after lunch which I had judiciously packed in the eski, we headed south east to Haverhill, the second largest town in the Borough of St Edmundsbury with a population of about 28,000, a town which Chris’s siblings  last year had wondered why we would even consider bothering to visit.

There is little published about Haverhill’s history apart from the fact that it dates back to Saxon times and is recorded in the 1086 Doomsday Book. Most of its historical buildings were lost to a great fire in 1667 and that seems to be that. However a planning review in 1956 offered impetus to the town’s growth, no doubt part of the same planning exercise that gave rise to the new towns following the Second World War to cope with London’s overspill. New factories were built, many obvious today, standing out rather incongruously surrounded by agricultural land. 

Nowadays you are more likely to find folk who sound more like Londoners than a Suffolk accent in the town, and while there was nothing super special to suggest Haverhill should be placed on the recognised tourist route, we were pleased we had swung by. Today the streets were busy with shoppers, swelled by holidaying families. The shops were busy and one could not help but feel that Haverhill wouldn’t be a bad place to live.

We noted the foxglove plants for sale in the flower markets for £10 a pop, (a joke to me when I remember my parents grubbing weeds such as this all those years farming in the King Country), and the entrance to St Mary’s Church advertising all comers to “come inside to look and  pray” simultaneously barricaded off with padlocked chains. We admired the exterior of the Haverhill Arts Centre, dating from 1883 with seating for 210 and not looking in the least as if it could do so.

From here we headed eastward along the A1017 and A1092, following the flow of the River Stour, that which continues on down through Sudbury and on to Manningtree where we were a week or so ago. We travelled along this route last year and on Saturday were no less charmed than we were then, the villages of Stoke by Clare, Clare and Cavendish, such iconically beautiful Suffolk villages.

 

We pressed on to Long Melford, the location of the National Trust’s Melford Hall which we visited last year, or was it the previous? The other stately home here is Kentwell Hall, rather impressive glimpsed from the road, but held in private hands and a little more selectively open to the public.

Long Melford is so named for the village’s long strung out three mile or more main street, and being the mill ford crossing the Chad Brook, a tributary of the River Stour. It is another one of Suffolk’s “wool towns” like nearby Sudbury and so many more I have written of, and is a former market town. 

But people were living in this spot as long ago as the Mesolithic Stone Age up to 8,300 BC. By 100 BC, the Iron Age tribe, the Belgae were settled here. Sometime after AD 43 the Romans occupied the centre of the village but little has been discovered of the Saxon period.

After the Middle Ages after the hold of the Abbey of St Edmundsbury, and when the wool trade was in decline, new industries came to the village, and in the 18^th century there was an iron foundry, coconut matting manufacturing an horsehair weaving, just as there was in nearby Lavenham.

These days it is the tourists who are drawn to the smart boutiques housed in the old and well preserved dwellings. On Saturday we were astounded by the number of Bentleys, Jags, Audis, Mercs and Rolls Royce’s parked in the street. Whether these were owned by the discerning customers of the galleries and antique shops, or customers of the many gastro pubs or perhaps the proprietors of these establishments, we will never know, but they did make an impression, or at least enough for me to remark on their presence here.

Yesterday was Sunday, the morning we follow national politics on television; political tragicks  that we are, but we did head away soon after  10 am calling on Chris’s sister en route, to check her impending move was on track and to say goodbye. The latter was easily dealt with but we left unsatisfied that she was emotionally and practically in control with the relocation. We hoped her daughters would step in and take control of matters that needed to be taken out of her hands; she, like so many of us who have lived long lives, has accumulated so many “treasures”, few of which will have any significance or value to those who will deal with her estate after she passes on. I offered my own advice; that she should imagine that she was to leave this mortal coil in say, ten years, and ask herself what would be of value, either financial or sentimental, to her children, grandchildren or great grandchildren after that historic event. Anything not qualifying those two tests should be discarded now rather than cluttering up her diminished space. Anything assigned to the attic in the next few weeks was unlikely to be revisited in the next ten years, and as such should be discarded. I suggested that rather than immediately culling according to the Bronwyn Principal, items be moved to the new spare room rather than the attic space, but attended to within the next three months.

Whether she pays attention to her bossy antipodean sister-in-law or not, we will not know until we return to Suffolk later in the year. I assured her I was so looking forward to seeing The Bungalow in its lived in state after she and her daughter had sorted themselves out; one would hope this would be within the next three months or so. But these are the sentiments of a woman who has lived in a motorhome or caravan for the last seven years; hardly typical.

We escaped the chaos before midday and headed toward Ipswich toward a place I had seen advertised on the signboards; the Gipping River Valley information centre on the slip exit road sharing the signpost with Great Blakenham. I was seeking an access point to the Gipping Valley Pathway, that which we have conquered in parts over the last year or so. We have so far walked, by connecting up sections, from Stowmarket to Pipps Ford Lock, down river from Needham Market, and I am always keen to join all the dots and claim the whole.

After some stuffing around, we did find ourselves a parking spot beside the river between Claydon and the southern reaches of Great Blakenham which we were able to use as our starting point. After lunching we set off up river on a well delineated track, passing between the River Gipping and a series of water filled gravel pits, the Barham “A” and “B” pits, Sharmford Mere, Causeway Lake and a series of unnamed lakes, the deeper ones home to crested grebes and those less so, ducks and Canada Geese. The path is lined with willows, hawthorns, nettles and a host of mauve flowering plants, attracting a mass of bumble bees. The brilliant turquoise Common Mayflower was everywhere, the blackbirds filled the hedgerows and small fish enjoyed the varied river flow; sometimes a slow moving flow through reeds and sometimes rushing over weirs which once accompanied the long retired locks. 

The lakes are all decommissioned aggregate extraction quarries, the materials used by local builders and farmers, and some used to build the A14 which is more often than not within hearing. The lakes have since been stocked with trout and course fish for anglers, some of whom we met today. We paused to chat with a father and two young sons and from them learned about the licencing requirement for all river fishermen, or at least those over twelve years of age. If a ranger randomly turns up, and finds an unlicensed fisher, he can slap a mighty fine and handcuffs on the perpetrator, and has pretty serious official powers. I suggested to this law abiding chap that they sounded as officious and scary as the NZ Fisheries Inspectors who have powers greater than the regular police. 

The afternoon’s weather had turned out much better than forecasted and we were feeling the heat as we continued on in our nettle resisting denim jeans and heavy walking boots. We walked upriver for an hour, beyond the Shamlock Lock, still far short of meeting up with Pipps Ford Lock, before turning back to the car and our camp at Base Green for the last time this spring. When we return here, unless we are prematurely called back for family reasons, autumn may well be upon us.

This morning we did not leave camp until about 10 am, to time our arrival at the Motorway Service Centre at South Binns for around midday. After an appropriate break, we came on to the Camping & Caravan Club Site here at Chertsey, a delightful spot we stayed at in June 2016 and today warmly welcomed by the resident pigeons and squirrels.

We are now all set up and enjoying our diverse fellow campers; soon we will get ready to go out to celebrate twenty four years of togetherness, one of our three “togetherness” anniversaries we celebrate. It also serves for a lazy out from cooking on our first night here on the western edge of Greater London.