Bury St. Edmunds Ramblers Walk - Knettishall Heath

For the very first time, I led a Ramblers' walk today, at Knettishall Heath. This was my route...

Thanks are due to Chris for advising me on my plans and Derrick for being my back marker. In all there was a total of 43 people on the walk, so it was hard to address them all with facts along the way. The walk was planned to allow us to walk through the several different habitats to be found in and around the Knettishall Heath Nature Reserve.

We were in Breckland here. Breckland is one of the UK’s biodiversity hotspots and the designation of much of Knettishall Heath as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) reflects this.
It is managed by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. As their site says...

"Of the more than 12,500 species living in the Brecks, 30% are nationally rare. Despite its name, Knettishall Heath is in fact a diverse mosaic of habitats with woodland and riverside meadows, as well as large areas of heath. It extends to over 430 acres.

The open landscape created by our Bronze Age ancestors 4,000 years ago had changed very little until the 20th century when forestry and modern farming transformed large parts of The Brecks. Knettishall Heath still retains a sense of what this ancient landscape must have looked like in the past. The 18th century rabbit warren and the Bronze Age burial mound at Hut Hill are evidence of thousands of years of human occupation, but at the western end of the heath, the ‘patterned ground’ is the product of a much earlier time. At the end of the last ice age, repeated freezing and thawing of the ground created a unique mixing of the sandy soil and the underlying chalk. The unusual vegetation stripes seen here reflect the two soil types and the different plants that grow in each."

The walk took in some of the Blue, Red, Green and Black waymarked trails, together with a bit of the distance paths the Peddars Way and Icknield Way.

We started by walking alongside a stretch of  the River Little Ouse, which has its source just a few miles East of our walk at Lopham and Redgrave Fen... (which features in my old blog in a post from 2006) and which is also the source of the River Waveney, which flows East.

For much of its length the river defines the boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk. The course continues through Rushford, Thetford, Brandon, and Hockwold before the river joins the Great Ouse north of Littleport in Cambridgeshire. The total length is about 37 miles (60 km). The river is currently navigable from the Great Ouse to a point 2 miles (3.2 km) above Brandon.

We left the river, turning south, when we got to the Peddars Way. Going the other way, you eventually get to the North Norfolk Coastal path.

It was lovely walking through the woods. Beneath the murmur of conversation I could hear the sound of 43 pairs of boots shuffling through the fallen leaves.

We got to the end of the Peddars way and continued on the Icknield way, one of the "four highways" of ancient England. In the south-west some writers take the Way to Exeter, while others only take it as far as Salisbury. To the north-east, Icklingham, Suffolk, and Caistor-by-Norwich, Yarmouth and Hunstanton, Norfolk have all been proposed as the destination.

We went past the boundary of the Nature Reserve and on to a broad path across some fields  to the south of the woods.. ...

...stopping for a drinks break along the way, until we came to the road. Here we had a view of Knettishall Airfield, with its commemorative line of trees along the route of the original main runway - used by American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers in the second world war. It was numbered as Station 136 by the United States Army Air Forces while home to the 388th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force between 1943 and 1945.

After a short walk along the road, we re-entered the Nature Reserve and took in some heathland...

....coming close to the Exmoor ponies...

...before returning to our start via the river again.

People seemed to enjoy it, and I managed not to lose my way.. or lose any ramblers en route, so I guess that counts as a success. Slightly shorter than the 5.7m advertised as I had altered the route, but nobody complained about being short-changed. We were blessed with excellent weather... which helps!

No photos from the day, but these were from my recce the week before... and added to the post once I was reunited with my camera!

You can see more details of the walk on my MapMyWalk log.