Suffolk Walking Festival - Walk 'n Water Sudbury and Cornard Riverside

Today we did Walk 24 of the Suffolk Walking Festival...

One of the things I love about the Festival is the way it engages with different groups around Suffolk. To day, we were being hosted by the River Stour Trust.


This was the most gentle of gentle strolls. In fact half of it involved no strolling at all! It was beautiful sunny morning - perfect for a little cruise down the River Stour and a meander back for a cup of coffee.

Here are a few of my photos.

Registering before the start. I was surprised to fin there were only 9 of us plus our walk leader and 2 members of the Trust. One lady who turned up had got the date wrong - she was booked on a later re-run of the same trip.

This was our boat, the Edwardian Lady,

We set off towards the main stretch of river passing underneath the bridge constructed for the old railway line, now defunct, heading towards Long Melford.

 We turned left when we got to the main river,

Some nice trees as we passed Friar's Meadow.

There were a few people from Sudbury Rowing Club out on the water. Here's one of them...
 

The river was very tranquil....

...and the passemgers were happy.

Too soon our river trip  came to an end and we alighted at Great Cornard lock.

Sadly, the visitor centre got badly damaged in a fire in Septemeber last year, and is currently closed.

We walked alongside the old mill race for Bakers Mill, now developed into a local community.

The river downstream from here had no paths on either bank.

We  stopped at the old mill pond....

...and visited the Mill Tye Art gallery in the renovated old mill building.

As we were about to leave, out official phot snapper for teh trust was joined by a member of staff at the gallery to take our photo for their Facebook page. And here we are!

We returned to Sudbury along the river. Here we have a view of Great Cornard church.

And here is the Quay Theatre....

 ,,,next door to our origin and destination for today.

And so to our promised cup of coffee on the terrace.

Well that was quite idyllic. Thanks Sue for leading the walk and Jim and Catherine from the Trust for the informative and entertaining commentary. I never knew, for example, that the river was drinking water for London  and that none of the water we traveled on would get to the sea! And I got an answer to how to pronounce the name of the River Stour... it depends!

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