Barrow Walk

 Today's walk, the latest of the U3A Bury St Edmunds Longer Walks group monthly walks, was from Barrow.

This was the invite from Martin:

"The walk will start and finish at Barrow Village Hall, what3words whisk.ruling.disband.  We will start at 10 a.m. and it will be approximately 4 hours to do the 9.5 miles. It is a circular walk via Hargrave and is fairly flat and on good paths. We haven't found a café or church, but there are shops and pubs in Barrow."

We had a good turnout of 10 for the walk and we had great weather for walking. This was our route, which we walked in a clockwise direction.

Here are a few of my photos.

Assembling at the start. Here was Jess telling us about our route. I then told everyone about the Mystery House which could be somewhere in the area we were walking today. Would we see it?

We walked past the Cave Adullam Baptist Chapel. I'd never noticed the unusual name before. The name refers to a stronghold referred to in the Old Testament - see here. The name was adopted by a denomination of struct Baptists.

We were soon out in the countryside.  Our path along the edge of Wilsummer Wood took us along the bed of a stream, but that was the nearest to any mud on our route.

We had some lovely yellow colours in the autumn sunshine. Here we were following a route I'd led walks along before from Great Saxham.

We crossed the CLH pipeline system. We would see plenty more markers for it later too.

We didn't see any people, but we did see some deer.

This is Chevington Lodge Farm, but we didn't get any closer to it.

At Hargrave village hall we came across a steam tractor which had parked there to refuel and take on more water before continuing on its journey.

This was our drinks and snacks stop.

Dawn remarked on the number of bees and butterflies on the ivy hedge.

We headed west and then northwest and came across some sunflowers.

In among them was some purple tansy.

We got a glimpse of the tower of Hargrave church.

And then some more sunflowers.

We crossed the workings for Anglian Water's new water main network.

These dog-rose hips added colour to the hedges.

We ignored the sign saying "Footpath closed"... and never found where it was closed.

We stopped at Denham Castle for our lunch break. There's not a lot of it to see, but you can make out some of the moat and a rising at the centre.

There is  display board about Denham Castle and Withgar, the last Saxon Lord of Desning.

In the distance we could see this house. At first I thought it was Dalham Hall, but it isn't. 

Could it be our mystery house? If the lefthand set of windows weren't there it would be a good match, and it has ivy growing on it. Had it been extended? Where was it - I'm not entirely sure what direction it is in. 

This photo shortly after we left our lunch spot maybe gives a clue.

The house is near the left end of the picture and those buildings in the foreground are Castle cottages. More investigation needed, I think!

We returned to Barrow passing the Denham Estate deer park.

In the next field Dawn found something buried into the path and dug it up.

W passed the orchard. Lots of apples left on the ground and unpicked on the trees.

Barrow village pond.

And here were back at the start. Dawn showed off her find. A bit of broken farm equipment, was the consensus.

A cup of tea was needed after all that, so some of us drove to Risby to visit The Nook at Risby Barn.

Thank-you Martin and Jess for leading us round and thanks also to the rest for the company.

You can see more details of our 9.3 mile route here on MapMyWalk (or download a GPX file here) and more of my photos here on Flickr.

Other related walks on my blog include:

• Barrow Walk (Oct 2019).
• Great Saxham Walk (Jun 2020).
• Hargrave and Chevington Walk (Jun 2020).
• Barrow Walk (Jun 2020).
• Barrow and Denham Castle Walk (Jul 2020).
• Hargrave Walk (Jul 2020)
• Hargrave and Great Saxham Walks (Jul 2020).
• Great Saxham Walk (Aug 2020)
• Barrow and Denham Castle Walk (Aug 2020).
• Dalham Walk (Jun 2021).
• Barrow Walk (Jul 2021).