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.

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.

Nashoba, Base Green, near Wetherden, Suffolk

                                                                                                                         

We arrived here on Friday having had a relatively uneventful trip across from Oxford on the A40 and M40, joining the M25 before heading north and across into Suffolk on first the A11 then the A14. We decided that this route via major motorways, although longer than the alternative across a maze of roundabout-ridden A-roads, would make for a more straight forward trip, something we would not have decided to do had we consulted Chris’s sister first. She subsequently told us a horror story of delays when delivering one of her daughters to Stansted Airport  just the week before.

After packing up camp on Home Farm, our hostess came over to wish us well whilst carrying a cherry pie over to the gate sale table. She sells jars of jam and baked items as an aside to the little camp, supplementing their pensions and any income that might be generated from the small land holding behind the house. I asked if she made crab-apple jelly from the fruit laden trees which formed our privacy hedge; she told us she never had but that the birds arrived in January to feed on the apples, still hanging on the tree after a further two months of autumn winds. However she said she did make apple pies with the Bramley apples of which there had been a heavy crop this year. In fact one of those pies was there on the table having been cooked earlier in the morning. I remarked that we loved apple pies and committed to the purchase before learning her price. The £2.80 was somewhat heftier than the £1 we have been regularly paying at all of the main stream superstores. Chris was appalled and reckoned it would have to taste three times better to warrant the exorbitant price; I can report that it was certainly twice as good, but I shall try to be a little less spontaneous in future. Chris was also concerned on another level, having seen the interior of her kitchen.

On arrival at our new “home” for the next week or so, our host was pleased to see us again, and was happy to chat; something he excels at. He explained the problems he has been having with moles and showed Chris his traps. These seem to have been occupying his time more than the progress on the bathroom block; I had been hoping he might have got around to installing the promised washing machine. Sadly, not.  

Today we have been spring cleaning the van; Chris up on Ivan’s ladder on the roof before washing the outside of the van whilst I crawled into cupboards scrubbing and vacuuming, not necessarily in that order. Over the past couple of days we have caught up with Chris’s sister and one niece, as well as securing a date for a family dinner the week after next. Tomorrow we will check out garages in Bury St Edmunds for an annual service and other like matters. It looks like a fortnight of bits and pieces ahead, although I have managed to interest Chris in a few places around the county I wish to check out before we leave.

Home Farm, Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire

The forecasted rain storm arrived on schedule, early this morning and forceful enough to find its way through the bathroom vent onto the floor. This is never a problem unless you happen to be resting in this intimate little spot at the exactly the right moment. I was still snug in bed, but … do I need to say more?

We set off into Oxford soon after 9 am, always a good plan if you wish to avoid the worst of the traffic in the morning; this is a well-recognised tactic for the retired. 

We parked up at the Peartree Park & Ride at the modest cost of £2 then were timely enough to catch the #300 into the city, for a further £4.80. We have learned that it is often to our advantage to buy the two tickets at the same time because many Councils offer a group ticket deal. (All these little savings add up.)

Alighting in the centre of the city we were at once familiar with our surroundings, having been here two years ago. However today we did not want to simply wander about aimlessly and come away at the end of the day no better educated about the city than last time, so after finding the Post Office to post mail and enjoying a coffee at our favourite Scottish restaurant, we joined the 11am two hour walking tour, run by Footprints Tours, in theory free but in fact reliant upon the generosity of the tourist to reward effort. 

Today our guide was post-graduate student Tibha, a delightful young Welshwoman of Asian heritage, who spoke with a well-educated English accent. Not only was she attractive, clear spoken, and super smart, but she also had an excellent sense of humour and was a thoroughly nice person. May she go far! 

The tour group was similarly pleasing, just six of us, all but one from DownUnder. I am not sure how many miles we covered but all of it was most enjoyable and very informative, as well as very entertaining.

Tibha explained how the university is made up of thirty nine colleges, and told us about many of the strange customs and traditions of the various colleges, clubs and past celebrities. 

We heard about the role that Oxford had played in the burning of the “heretics” on the orders of Bloody Mary Tudor in the mid-1500s, about Cardinal Wolsey who established Christ Church College, the tunnels that run under the city allowing for books to be conveyed from one building to another, and so much more. We admired the Bridge of Sighs, the Bodleian Library, Divinity School where exams are sat, the frontage of significant colleges and so much more. Oxford is full of stories and well worth a day’s exploration and then one will barely brush the surface. 

When we managed to prise ourselves free of her presence, we found a spot near the Cathedral to lunch, then made our own way around the city investigating some of the spots Tibha had highlighted such as the many storied bookstore of Blackwell’s where one could spend a fortune on the printed word if flight weight restrictions were not an issue. I was keen to check out the Jane Austin exhibition in the library however the building had been evacuated, the fire alarms were still going off and the fire engines were yet to arrive. 

We pressed on to Pitt Rivers Museum, basically a natural history museum, but of the kind to keep my attention for more than half an hour. The exhibitions also include archaeological and ethnographic objects from all parts of the world as well as being a place of teaching and research. 


The museum was founded in 1884 by General Pitt Rivers, an influential figure in the development of archaeological and evolutionary anthropology, who gave his collection to the University of Oxford. Then there were more than 26,000 objects in the museum but now there are over half a million. Thankfully not all are on display or my eyes may well have glazed over after all. 

I was particularly taken with the glass case full of a multitude of cockroaches, along with a host of other weird, whacky and wonderful exhibitions, all very well curated. The building alone was worth a visit with its great structure of cast iron and glass, very much a pioneering development of the time, following on from the Crystal Palace in London.

The day had remained dry throughout, and as we travelled back on the bus to the Park & Ride, the sun shone down upon the city and we were glad to be seated high in the front of the double decker bus, to enjoy the street scenes. 

Today heralded the last of our touring because tomorrow we will head “home” to Suffolk, with about two and a half weeks to spend with family and sorting the caravan and car for storage, before heading down to London for a few days prior to flying back to New Zealand. There will no doubt be more travel, places and mini-adventures to be recorded, but it will not necessarily be a daily affair as it has been for the last few months. But then, who knows what lies ahead?