There and Back

Where shall we go today with Izobelle? Well, not far from her home is the Museum of East Anglian Life, and that is where we headed. The Museum of East Anglian Life is one of the biggest Museums in Suffolk. It occupies over 75 acres of countryside in the heart of Stowmarket. The land was originally part of the Home Farm for the Abbot’s Hall estate. The estate's history dates from medieval times when it was an outlying manor for St Osyth’s Priory in Essex. It passed through numerous owners until it was purchased by the Longe family in 1903. Huge changes in the 1950’s and ‘60s meant England was in danger of losing long established skills, equipment and buildings if something was not done to rescue them. Individual collectors, local farmer Jack Carter and the Suffolk Local History Council worked to collect, preserve and display objects from rural East Anglia. After several years of temporary exhibitions the Misses Vera and Ena Longe placed 70 acres of farmland, Abbot’s Hall, ...

The church of The Blessed Virgin Mary in Woolpit is one of the great medieval churches of Suffolk, a county blessed with some of the finest country churches in England. Like so many other Suffolk villages Woolpit owes its superb church to the wealth of the medieval wool trade, but there was a church on this spot centuries before Suffolk wool merchants gained their wealth. Woolpit became a destination for pilgrims during the medieval period, when it held a richly decorated statue of Our Lady in its own chapel. No trace of this chapel now survives but it was probably on the north side of the chancel, where the vestry now stands. Alternatively, it may have stood at the east end of the south aisle. Pilgrims began arriving at least as early as 1211 when the Bishop of Norwich ordered that their offerings be given to St Edmundsbury Abbey. The Shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit became extremely popular during the 15th and 16th centuries. Henry VI visited twice, and Queen Elizabeth of Y...

The scene that greeted us as we arrived at Dunwich Heathland to start, as it turned out, the Pirate Trail. Armed with a leaflet with the route marked, and a pen, we set off ! The heathland really looking colourful.  This was the object of our searches - a board with a clue printed on it, which had to be copied onto the leaflet ... such as this! One of the objectives of the day was for Izobelle to take her first photographs with her own camera. So lets photograph all sorts of things! Then perhaps Nana will help me fill in the clues. Then I can run onto the next clue! Then a rest while mummy tells me something I don`t quite believe! Although it was funny. These grown ups say this smells lovely, so we have a group sniff. Then mummy spotted this lovely caterpillar on the path which turned out to be an Emperor Moth or Saturnia pavonia (if you speak Latin) Then, having completed all the ...

We chose to go to Fermyn Woods Country Park as it has a reputation of having a large number and variety of butterflies. We booked into a B&B cottage nearby in the village of Sudborough in what appears to be a converted farm building in the back garden of the owners house. It was perfect, and at a really good price. But first, to the woods to see what was about in the afternoon sun! The whole area around the villages of Sudburough and Lowick, and also Fermyn Woods itself, were once part of the vast Rockingham Forest. It was named after the village of Rockingham, where the castle was a royal retreat. Over the years the forest shrank, and today only a patchwork of the north-eastern forest remains. The area became a royal hunting ground for King William I after the Norman conquest. The term forest represented an area of legal jurisdiction and remained so until the 19th century. The forest boundaries were set in 1299, although the boundaries returned to a smaller area as a resul...

Wicken Fen was the very first nature reserve owned by the National Trust and has been in their care since 1899. To quote the National Trust :  `For more than 100 years we've worked hard to protect the rare species that live at Wicken through intensive management of the fen habitats. This has become increasingly difficult and by the late 20th Century it had become clear we could not protect this unique place because the nature reserve was just too small & too isolated.  The Wicken Fen Vision is an ambitious project to create a landscape scale nature reserve stretching from Wicken Fen to the edge of Cambridge, creating new habitats for both wildlife and humans. In 1999, we launched the Wicken Fen Vision, a 100 year plan to extend the reserve from Wicken to the outskirts of Cambridge, covering an area of 5300 sq hectares.  Our aim is to buy land as and when it comes up for sale, and restore it to fen and wetland habitat. We gradually raise water levels and use ...