Needham Market and Darmsden Walk

"Can we go for a walk this afternoon?", asked Sarah after lunch had been cleared away. Well there was a turn up for the books. Sarah has hardly been out the house since coming home from University over 2 months ago.

I decided to take her and Dawn on a short walk they hadn't been on before, but I had done a couple of times as part of longer walks. We drove to Needham Market and parked by the lake. Gosh it was busy! Mind you, it does feature in the the East Anglian Daily Times' recent list of 5 top places for  a picnic in Suffolk and it is half-term, warm and sunny. Busy, but there is plenty of room to spread out and we had no trouble keeping a social distance away from people at the start of our walk round the lake. And, once we got out of town, we saw hardly anyone on the rest of our walk.

This was our route.

Here are some of my photos.

The River Gipping at the start.

The lake had some lovely irises and plenty of water fowl, including some cygnets.

A grebe.

We crossed the railway line via the Cattle tunnel. None of us were tall enough to have to duck.

We liked this shady woody tunnel up the hill  into the open countryside.

We passed through fields of barley - or is it wheat - to Darmsden church.

Here we stopped for a drink.

A train came just after we crossed the track.

We saw plenty more birds in the water filled gravel pits, including moorhen...

...and a lapwing.

The rest of our walk was back along the river.

By Pipp's Ford there is a replica of the mathematical bridge.

We saw lots of banded demoiselles.

More youngsters. This time some geese with their goslings.

We heard, but didn't see, 2 cuckoos on our way back. Soon we were at the mill and the car park.

But we couldn't go on the slide.

Well that was a lovely short afternoon walk. I wonder if Sarah will come out with us again soon?

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