Great Saxham Ramblers Walk

I got a call from Carole on the Bury St. Edmunds Ramblers Committee. "Did I know walks had re-started?", she asked. I knew what was coming next and said that although I hadn't had any walks on the Summer programme, I had four I could offer as "pop-up" walks over the next few weeks. Last week's Hargrave walk was the first and today's was the second. It was a variant of one I had done before for Joyce's Weekly Walks, but adapted to reduced the length a bit.It is based on this walk, a West Suffolk Wander by Chris Barker, online on the East Anglian Daily Times site and, as I transcribed it to get a route overlaid on the OS map, I adjusted it to remove some of the road walking

This was the walk listing...

In the end I didn't trim it back to 5 miles but left in a extra bit to get the splendid view from New Road at the northernmost point of my original walk, making it about 6 miles in total.

This was our route today...

There were 10 of us in total which made it very convivial as everyone had a chance to talk to everyone else. Here are a few of my photos.

St. Andrew's Church  is well worth a visit, but I left that for people to do at the end if they wanted. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described St Andrew’s church as ‘one of the prettiest churches in the county, both in itself and in its setting’.

 Here is some of the stained glass.

After passing through the churchyard we had a little bit of road walking. We only got a glimpse of Great Saxham Hall.

But then we got a surprise. Not something I've ever seen on a walk before... A peahen and her 3 chicks crossed the road in front of us!

Soon we were on the broad country paths with glorious views of rolling countryside.

On our path was a ford over the brook. There was a footbridge  too, but we were able to use the ford without getting wet feet... not a drop of water flowing, unlike the first time I did this walk.

Well I didn't have this in my risk assessment for the walk. We got overtaken by a tractor!

This field edge has one of the best variety of wildflowers I can remember seeing. Clover, mallow, vetch, bridsfoot trefoil and rosebay willowherb were all among those I recognised.

I managed a shot of my fellow walkers.

We stopped for our mid-walk drinks break at Burthorpe Green.

One of the houses has a well in the garden

Nearly time to get people going again.

We got some great views to the north at the northernmost part of our route.

Beside the path on our way back towards Burthorpe Green there were several apple trees. The fruit was rather sour, though.

This sign was new.  The farmer had a created a couple of temporary permissive paths (but we stuck to our planned route). The sign had lots of fun facts about the fields we were passing.

Bridge Field  8.9 HA - Sugar Beet. Potential yield 85 tonnes/HA. Enough to make 166,000 1lb jars of jam.
Rectory & Otlers Field  15.8 HA - Winter wheat. 10 tonnes/HA which can 286,600 loaves of bread or 53,000 L of ethanol.
Wood Field and Mullins 23.5 HA - Forage Maize 40 tonnes/HA used as feedstock for an anaerobic digester which will make 314,900 kWhrs of electricity - enough to power 86 houses for a year or power a Nissan Leaf for 750,000 miles.

Wow!

 We finished our walk by walking through Great Saxham village back to the church.

We were pleased to see even the garden statues were wearing masks.

One of the lovely cottages.

Out of the village now on the way back to the church we recrossed an oil pipeline we had crossed the other side of the woods early on our walk. Part of the CLH pipeline system, perhaps?

And soon we were back at the church carpark.

So thanks to all who came and joined me on the walk. It was lovely weather for it, wasn't it?

You can see more details of the full version of the walk here on MapMyWalk and more photos here and here on Flickr.