This was the invite from Joyce...
"This Friday February 14th I'm offering a walk from The Folk Cafe (Fornham Business Court, The Drift, Fornham St Martin, Bury Saint Edmunds IP31 1SL). Plenty of parking here. Please meet at 10am for coffee and we will start walking about 10.45am. It will be a lovely 8 mile circular route to Fornham, Hengrave, Culford and Timworth to see plenty of snowdrops. Finish back at The Cafe approx 2.15pm."
This was our route.
I arrived early at the Folk Cafe and had a No-carb breakfast, scrambled egg, bacon and avocado, to go with my coffee while I waited for the others. Hmm. Well avocado is 8.5% carbohydrate, so "no" is maybe a bit of a misnomer, but it tasted nice. Joyce was next to arrive, followed by Carolyn, who just came to join us for a coffee, and then the others. There were 8 of us in all on the walk, including a new member of the group, Sally. Welcome Sally!
Here are just a few of my photos of our walk.
The Folk Cafe was very busy,
Coffee!
And off we went.
Jane pointed this out. What could this be a fire assembly point for? There were no buildings for several hundred metres. How odd! I wondered if had been left behind when the road was built.
We passed Fornham St. Martin church, but didn't visit.
Nearby, there was a lovely bunch of narcissi underneath the road sign as we turned left.
We came to the small dog hotel....
...and a cute pony.
Our first decent spread of snowdrops...
..was just before we crossed the golf course as All Saints Hotel.
We walked alongside the River Lark for a bit....
...with a view of the ruined Fornham St. Genevieve Church. To quote the linked site... "The ruined church of St Genevieve is marooned in the park of Fornham Hall to the north of Bury. The tower, which is all that survives, stands on private land, a good half a mile from the nearest road. Although the church is only a mile or so north of Bury St Edmunds, it stands on wild heathland, and is not reachable from the village of Fornham St Genevieve itself. Instead, you have to approach it from the north, along a track which begins on a back road near Culford. In the old days, this would have meant risking the wrath of the owners of Fornham Hall, but today the Hall stands empty, and is being converted into apartments. The church was destroyed by fire in 1782, and was derelicted in 1813".
As we approached Culford, we came to a great swathe of snowdrops. Are they not as good as last year? See here to compare.
The Culford village sign.
Crossing some fields to Ingham, we passed the Brewshed brewery without sampling the beers.
We found a muddy bit, but it didn't amount to much beyond this.
A view of Ingham church just before we got to Ampton racecourse.
From here we headed on to Timworth Church.
The snowdrops here were definitely less profuse than last year.
And here we are back where we started saying our goodbyes.
Thanks Joyce for the lovely walk, and to everyone else too for the company.
You can see more details of our walk here on MapMyWalk and more of my photos here on Flickr.
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