It's the first Thursday in the month and time for the Bury St. Edmunds U3A Longer Walks group monthly walk.
This month Jane was our leader and she took us to Brettenham to do a version of
this walk.
This was the invite.
"Dear walkers, I am planning a walk next Thursday the 3rd of
August. I plan to meet at Brettenham
Village Hall, (post code 1P7 7QP) at 10.00 am.
The walk will be approximately 9 and a half miles. There will hopefully
be a pub open for drinks at lunch time but please bring lunch and drink with
you. Please let me know if you plan to join me."
We had a great turnout of 11 on the walk - nearly the entire group and including, for the first time, Dawn who is now a U3A member.
This was our route.
Here are a few photos.
Jane explaining our route.
We had a big field to go through near the start.
I was glad I'd brought my secateurs as we made our way through the wood here.
We had nice weather with fluffy white clouds.
Finally out of the crops, we passed some lovely horses.
We climbed up towards Preston St. Mary.
But we had a problem. We were going to be too early for the pub! So we did an extra little loop past Preston Hall. Here on a small pond by the path we found a black swan. Can you see it?
We had a drinks stop here. The mound had been mown since we were last here a few weeks ago (see
here).
We just had to follow the path to the top, where we found this.
Most mysterious. And we had a great view from here.
This is the metal bull we saw last time.
The sheep are still there too.
Our loop took us down the hill to this thatched house.
Ros reminded us that the red colour of the paint is, allegedly, from pigs' blood. Or was it? (See
here, for example).
By now it was well past 12pm so we continued back up into the village to
The Six Bells, Est.1416, as it says on the wall.
We had our lunch stop here..
Onward now though more golden fields.
We caught a glimpse of Old Buckenham Hall School, which we had passed early in our walk. We would go past the gates a bit later.
The clouds were gathering, but it stayed dry.
We came to
Down Hall, with it's menagerie of statues in the garden across the River Brett from the house,
This field had a profusion of pretty flax flowers.
This disused phone box has seen better days.
Shortly afterwards we came across this cute miniature horse.
As we weren't parked at Thorpe Morieux village hall, unlike previous versions of this walk (Jane had checked and they had a funeral wake on there this afternoon), we took a different path towards the church. On the way, we passed this fellow.
Lovely stained glass windows,
In the children's area they had an old school desk with inkwells. That brought back a few memories.
We decided to skip the extra mile or so loop that avoided less than 1/2 mile of road as we approached Brettenham once more. There are some lovely houses in the village.
And here we were back at the village hall.
Thanks-you Jane for leading us round and thanks to everyone else for the company. You can find more details of our 10 mile route here on MapMyWalk (or download a GPX file here) and see more of my photos here on Flickr.
You can find these related walks elsewhere on my blog
No comments:
Post a Comment