Friday, 22 March 2019

Lavenham Walks

"Next Friday, we are starting in Lavenham for our walk. We will meet outside The Cock Horse Inn (CO10 9SA) on Church Street at 10am. There is a free car park nearby with public toilets. Please note that the car park can be full so pls park on the street if necessary. We will then walk to Brent Eleigh and try Cafe Como for a pit stop", said the invite to Joyce's Weekly Walks group.

Originally this might have been 5 or 6 of us, but the numbers grew until, on the day, we had 22 -  a Ramblers or Suffolk Walking Festival scale outing! Which reminds me... I'd better book my tickets for the Festival walks I want to go on. Some are sold out already. Today we had everyone who was on yesterday's walk, plus a few more regulars - and several I had never met before.

The plan was for a figure-of-eight walk with the option of stopping at lunchtime, but then we added an extra loop to get to a distance of over 10 miles... as Roland says, it's not worth the bother of traveling a distance for a walk of less than that.

Of course I had been to Lavenham many times before, and have a couple of other blog entries with one of a  trip by bike in 2006 and then on a lovely sunny day in January this year with the Ramblers.

Our morning walk took Brent Eleigh (read more about its history here and here) and Cafe Como. When we got to the famous timber-framed building at the centre of Brent Eleigh village, Joyce asked if I'd seen it before and was surprised when I said yes.

It was then that I discovered I had a blog post missing! I had never written up the ramblers walk I went on In October... the day before flying out to Marbella.

You can see my photos from that here, including some pictures of the famous murals in the Church.

The church wasn't on the agenda for today, but a lot of the route was similar, although without the extra bits we added in the afternoon. Here is our route today.


Here are a few of my photos from the walk(s) today.




I loved this tree-lined path with daffodils at the side.


This derelict building looks sad.


We stopped at Cafe Como. The coffee was excellent.


It is a cafe frequented by cyclists. Some of them were a little unimpressed at having their watering hole invaded by walkers! Here is one of several groups who arrived while we were having our drinks.


The village hall is rather quaint.



This "tudor masterpiece", Corner Farmhouse, has been lovingly restored, as described here. The inside is as impressive as the outside!


Today's iconic sight was Lavenham Church.


Over the course of our walks today we got to see it from every direction.

This house, at Clay Hill, is rather curious.


The case study, here, says "The intention of this application is to create a new house which is zero carbon, truly ground breaking and one which enhances its landscape setting and makes a positive contribution to the local community. It will be an exemplary building of local and regional significance, meeting the highest standards of design and sustainability". All very worthy, but the end result was, we thought, rather less aesthetically pleasing than the older buildings we passed on our walk.





This house, De Vere House...


..featured in the Harry Potter films and is on sale. Read all about it here.

We finished our morning walk outside the Guildhall, where we said goodbye to half the group and munched our sandwiches before continuing.





This blossom-framed gateway looked very inviting, but it was not our route.


And here is a last photo of the church.


That was just a selection of my photos. You can view them all here on Flickr and you can find more details of our route in my MapMyWalk log.

Thanks, Joyce for another great walk.. or three!

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