Hawkedon Walk

Today, in celebration of Dawn's retirement, we went on a version of a favourite walk from Hawkedon with drinks and a meal afterwards.

This was the invite from Joyce.

"Thursday September 7th. A retirement/birthday walk for Dawn. This will be an afternoon walk of about 5 miles ...start time is 3.30pm outside Hawkedon Church. We will walk a shorter Hawkedon route in reverse so that we finish at the pub. Please do join us." 

This was our route today, as the invite said, a shorter version of the Hawkedon Horizons walk, but in a clockwise direction.

There were 6 of us on the walk and Aidan and Carolyn joined us later at the pub. We had a lovely afternoon for the walk and avoided the hottest part of the day.

Here are a few of my photos.

Dawn and I were early. We parked at the pub and walked down to  St. Mary Hawkedon church to visit it before we started. But it wasn't long before we were all assembled and I took a group photo (see the top of the post) before we set off.

It is a bit of a climb out of the village coming this way, but we soon had the usual lovely view back.

We didn't get to All Saints, Stansfield church..

...but we did pass the old mill.

But then we took our shortcut, missing out the loop to Denston. The ford across the River Glem here was dry and we didn't need the footbridge.

We followed the path up the hill...

...to the Grade I listed Purton Green Farmhouse.

 

Here we found someone who was staying there picking Bullace plums. He told us he had been staying at Landmark Trust properties for many years and this was his 47th. We never knew there were so many.

We headed on to the Grade II listed Cordell Hall, spotting some buzzards on the way.

Then it was on to the lakes where we saw cormorants and a heron and two wild swimmers.

We stopped at our last one to admire the tranquillity.

There was a bull in this field so we took a parallel route.

Our view of  Hawkedon House, the former rectory, showed we were nearly finished.

Our walks end was  The Queen's Head pub, which dates from the 15th century.

We sat in the garden with lovely views for a drink.

Somewhat surprisingly, they couldn't fit us in for pizza, but no matter - we just travelled up the road a few miles back towards Bury St. Edmunds and stopped at The White Horse in Whepstead.

The food was excellent! Thanks Joyce and Nick for the walk and, especially, for treating everybody afterwards. Thanks also to the others for the company.

You can see more of my photos here on Flickr and more details of our 5.2m route here on MapMyWalk (or download a GPX file here).

Other related walks on my blog include:

• Hawkedon Horizons (May 23)
• U3A Hawkedon Walk (Dec 22)
• Hawkedon Horizons (May 22)
• Rede Walk (Nov 20)
• Hawkedon Denson and Stansfield Walk (Jul 20)