Mildenhall Warren Walk

Today was Day 10 of Joyce's Mini Walking Festival and today's walk was in Joyce's local patch around Mildenhall. This was the invite... 

"Thanks for joining in this walk on Sunday. We will park and meet at The Jubilee Centre car park which is the lower car park near Sainsbury's Mildenhall (Recreation Way IP28 7HG) at 2pm. There are toilets at Sainsbury's. We will walk along the River Lark to Barton Mills and then into Mildenhall Woods. We then cross the A1065 and walk a little of the Cut-off Channel. Then it’s up to Mildenhall Warren and The Warreners Lodge. Read David Falk’s description of the Warrener's Walk n Great British Life here.

I have an 8 mile walk planned and no more. It’s mostly a woodland walk with a little pavement at the end to return to the car park. I expect we will finish around 5-5.30pm so bring snack/drink with you for a stop along the way."

This was our route..

Here are a few of my photos...

We started with a walk along the River Lark and admired the Barton Mills gardens opposite.

Near the Turnpike Bridge we found a swan on her nest.

We passed the NHS East Anglia Ambulance Vehicle Workshop. What a lot of ambulances!

We reached the Cut-off Channel and wondered, at first, which way it was flowing. But some of the floating leaves etc showed us which way the water was headed.

We followed it to Tollgate Weir

Going along the edge and then through the woods we found informative circular panels for the Warrener's World walk.

We stopped for our drinks break. Eagle-eyed Dawn spotted a muntjac deer here in the field.

We loved the landscape. Like the prairies, it was suggested. I said it reminded a bit of the Wiltshire downs, but there's no mistaking the Brecks landscape treeline.

Going through the wood we found Scots pines on the left (wiggly) and Corsican (I guess) pines (ramrod stright) on the right.

The Warrener's Lodge is fairly similar to Thetford Warren, which Dawn and I visited recently (see here).

The gorse was in bloom and smelling of coconut.

This stand of young silver birch trees was rather elegant.

Looking back at the Warrener's Lodge.... and a reminder of a family walk here years ago, Ooo look what I found here!

We came across some people with radio-controlled model cars making them whizz around. This one whizzed too much and crashed.

Another snapped tree... we had one of those last Saturday

The trees were very tall here.

Now it was back the way we came along the River Lark,

Lovely. Thank-you Joyce for leading us round and the ithers for the convivial company.

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