East Bergholt Walk

"Friday Nov 8th Please join us for a 'circular' walk from East Bergholt to Flatford Mill via Stratford St Mary and Dedham. This will be a recce walk for the Suffolk Walking Festival 2020. We will stop for an early morning coffee/cake here at Hall Farm Shop. I'm hoping to extend my usual route to about 12-13 miles. Pls bring a sarnie for a brief stop at Flatford Mill around lunchtime. There is a car share from Skyliner Way Sports Centre, Bury St Edmunds at 9.15am or meet up at East Bergholt free car park at 10am (postcode CO7 6TB). There are public toilets here.The walk is simply a 10/10 walk with some ascent and descent and beautiful views over the Dedham Vale. Pls expect mud, cows and wet feet as we will be walking through the water meadows. We need to finish the walk by 4pm so we are back in Bury for 5pm.", said the invite from Joyce. Lovely. I remember doing this with the group at the end of March (see here). It would be nice to do it in the autumn.

This was our route.

Here are a few of my photos.

All ready to start walking at 10:00am on the dot.

It was a bit misty to start with.

We had some lovely leaf-strewn paths to walk along.

The River Sour looked very peraceful and was quite high, but without any flooding.

We passed Dedham... here's the view looking back along the river towards the mill.

As usual I was often left behind as I took photos, but I have a "catch up" walking speed that gets me back to the group.

In a departure from our previous route, we headed towards  Startford St. Mary and Halls Farm Shop. Here's a view of the church as we approached.

The murkiness in the air gave the autumn colours a bit of an impressionistic feel.

They had some highland cattle at the farm.

The coffee shop was good and had some towering cakes.

They also had alpacas.

As we set off again, it was raining, but that only lasted about 1/2 hour or so.

With many of the leaves now gone, we could see plenty of mistletoe.

Wes topped to admire this redwood tree.

As we headed towards Flatford the leaves on the trees were bejeweled with rain droplets.

Soon we were at Flatford and able to recross the river by the famous bridge.

While we were stopped there for our lunch, a kingfisher came and sat opposite.

We headed on past Flatford Mill...



...and Willie Lott's Cottage.

Joyce was a bit nervous that the water meadows would be too wet to walk through, but they were fine so we were able to follow our planned route.

Returning to East Bergholt we got nice views over Dedham Vale to Dedham.

 We got a bit of fleeting sunshine that lit up the landscape. This is the sort of view I had come on the walk to see!

We finished, as previously, by visiting the bells at East Bergholt church.

Well that was indeed a lovely walk and we had only a couple of serious bits of mud to navigate and the rain didn't last too long. Nice though Hall Farm was, we agreed that the walk to it (and back along the same route in the rain) in close proximity to the A12 was not a highlight of the route. Thanks Joyce for organising and leading and to everyone else for their company.


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