Ramblers Beyton Walk

It's a Tuesday and time for a Bury St. Edmunds Ramblers walk in the spring sunshine.. This was the listing...

Yes. It was my turn to lead again! And with a certain amount of trepidation, I admit. The car park at Beyton Church is quite generous, but is it big enough for all the cars? And what would the heavy overnight rain have done to my planned route which was only slippery in parts yesterday?

I needn't have worried. The car park was was skillfully filled with only a couple of people having to park on the road, and conditions were just as anyone would expect... "In just-spring, when the world is mud-licious... [and] puddle-wonderful", as this poem by e.e.cummings says.

I decided yesterday, when I did my second recce, to compromise my planned route to do only half of the originally planned path through the woods to avoid a surfeit of mud-licousness, but not to give up on the walk through Free Wood. So we followed the route I had done on my recce last week.

Here are a few of my photos from the day, including a few from my recces. All Saints, Beyton Church is unusual in having a round tower.

Here we are at the start, with Julia giving us a couple of updates including the availability of brochures for the Suffolk Walking Festival, about which more anon! But suffice it to say I am leading three of the walks and back-marking on two. Someone mentioned there was a Beyton Beast? Would we see it?

The horses weren't in the field today, but they were last week.

Oh dear. The footpath has been rather mucked up by some heavy farm machinery.

But we managed to bypass the problem.

 We passed some wild primroses.

As we neared Rougham, we crossed a ditch just before the Bennet Arms. A little early for a pint, alas. Maybe I should have done this walk in the opposite direction.

We walked past the village sign...

...along Kinghall Street. This house, dated 1894, looked like it had been something else previously, but I couldn't find out what. Does anybody know?

Heading along Oak Lane, we came across this interesting modern house. Oak Lane House.

I do enjoy seeing desirable residences on my walks!

Now we were approaching Bradfield St. George and got a view of the church, but we weren't going to visit.

We passed a house with some lovely spring flowers in the garden.

And a house that was badly named.

We stopped for our drinks break in some shelter from the wind...

...near this interesting large thatched house.

Only 1 bag of poo available from Ruby today, but there were no takers. Well nobody had a rucksack big enough, I guess.

Now we came to our adventure of the day with some mud-licious paths through the woods and past this house.

I decided not to take us along more of this path... enough mud-liciousness for one day. So we headed back along the road...

 ... to rejoin our initial route in reverse for the last 3/4 mile, seeing again views of Hesset Church

...before arriving back at our starting point.

So thank-you everyone for coming and I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did. Did we see the Beyton Beast? Not today, but maybe the 38 of us frightened it off. You can see more details of our route here on MapMyWalk and more of my photos here on Flickr.