Suffolk Walking Festival - Santon Downham Walk

This was another of Joyce's walks in the Suffolk Walking Festival and she invited me to join her as a back-marker. It was to be my 10th and last event in this year's festival as I am at work tomorrow and Thursday, doing something else on Friday and couldn't get a ticket for the walk I wanted to do on Saturday. But I've had a great variety of walks and it has kept me busy keeping the blog up to date!

Here is how today's walk was described.

The clouds looked a bit threatening so I wore my coat and packed my waterproof in my little backpack. I needn't have worried... by 15 minutes into the walk I was taking my coat off.

This was our route...

Here are some photos from our walk...

Joyce gave us a briefing on the walk and what we would see.

We started by crossing this bridge, which appeared in a Dad's Army episode, as described here.

The Little Ouse is not that little.

We came across Waymarking signs for a new route, the Via Beata, which will, when complete, run across the width of the country from Lowestoft to St. Davids in the far southwest corner of Wales.

A little further upstream, we came to another bridge crossing the river, but we stayed on the Norfolk bank.

Further along still we came to the tiny church  of All Saints Santon, which was made redundant in 1998.

Our flower of the day was Broom.

Talking of flowers, we came across this group of botanists doing a study of the local plant-life near the site of St. Helen's Well.

From the terrace here we had a good view of Little Lodge Farm, where you can bring your horse on holiday.

But what was that in among the swans and geese? It was a cormorant drying its wings.

We took a little detour to visit the prehistoric burial mound at Blood Hill, not that there is much left of it after all of these years.

Nearby we spotted a pair of Stonechats. (Thanks, Barry). Here is one of them.

We recrossed the railway line, passing a model aircraft airfield.

There are several paths crossing each other here, including the St. Edmund Way.

We also recrossed the river...

..and took a detour into the woods to find the Two Mile Bottom Bat Hibernaculum Read more about it here too.
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My fellow back-marker/marshal Carolyn will be disappointed I didn't manage to photograph any bats, but here is someone else's photo from here of a Natterer's bat roosting in one of the bat-bricks inside in early 2009.

As is often the case  around here, we were buzzed by military jets on a training sortie. Can you see this one whizzing overhead?

We stepped aside to let some horses by ... horses and riders on their holidays at Little Lodge, perhaps?

All too soon we were back at the car park where we started. And we hadn't got wet!

Thanks Joyce for the lovely walk!

You can see more of my photos here on Flickr and more details of our route here on MapMyWalk.