Oxburgh Hall

Well the plan was to join the Bury St. Edmunds Ramblers on a walk from Coddenham. But William wasn't up on time and I wasn't really in the mood for a regimented walk with 40+ other people. So we had a more leisurely start and had a day out at Oxburgh instead. And were we in for a surprise!

We have National Trust family Membership, so its good to make use of it. We've been to Oxburgh Hall a few times, and it even featured in  my old blog, but we hadn't been for quite a while.

We arrived just before 11, when the ground and garden opened, and did a quick circumnavigation of the house and moat before visiting the snowdrop woods and doing a combination of the Woodland and Circular walks. This was our route...

Here are a few photos from that...

The equivalent picture on the National Trust site suffers from converging verticals. Not that mine is quite right!

I just love those chimneys.



The shadows are very striking.

And then we visited the winter/spring flowers. Look at this!

Spectacular!

Then we went on the walks and got some nice views.

Wow! I know we've had a great year for snowdrops and saw a great show on Joyce and Nick's Snowdrop walk on Saturday and my Cavenham walk the previous Friday, but this was, I think, the best display I've ever seen.

We were getting hungry so went to the local Bedingfield Arms for lunch. Luckily we beat the rush, and the food (and Humpty Dumpty Swallowtail Beer) was delicious!

Then we did the local walk described on the National Trust Oxburgh Hall  site. It was, to be frank, rather underwhelming compared to recent walks, although we did see the site of an old church, a farm that had turned into a paintball centre and lots of gulls around the fields that were being ploughed.

Here was our route...

 
And here are a few photos.

Oxburgh Church is interesting, but we couldn't go in as it is not open on weekdays at this time of year. The tower and spire blew down in 1948, destroying a lot of the church as it fell.

So, before we headed for home, we took a last peek at the flowers by the hall.

Here is a slideshow of my photos (Flash required)...

You can view them all here on Flickr, and see more details of our routes here and here on MapMyWalk. A very nice day out.. and a place to visit well worth remembering for this time of year in years to come!