Norton Walk to Langham Hall Gardens

Today we walked from Norton to Langham and back to visit Langham Walled Garden.

This was the invite from Joyce.

"Thursday June 13th We are kindly being hosted by James Thomas at The Walled Garden Langham. James will be on hand for a guided tour and we are allowed to eat our packed lunches there too. We will meet/park at Norton Village Hall, 4 Ixworth Road, IP31 3LE at 10am and we will head to The Dog pub for coffee. If you don't want coffee then pls join us at 10.40am at the pub. We will then head over to Hunston and Langham. The walk is approx. 8 miles as I want to enjoy the gardens".

She later sent an update saying that, as The Dog doesn't open until 10:30, we will meet then instead... which we did. 

This was our route today.

Here are a few of my photos.

We assembled at The Dog. I'd had enough coffee for the day so had a malty isotonic drink instead.

Walking through Norton village we passed some colourful gardens....

...and nice cottages.

Just before we reached Norton church we saw this encampment.

There were some people by the church...

...and on our path. It was some archaeology students on a field trip. I wonder if they will find anything interesting?

We passed through a number of different crops today.

I recognised where we were as we got to Hunston church.

We were soon entering the hamlet of Langham.

This is the entrance to the walled garden.

We had a lovely time being shown round by James.

The roses were particularly good.

They will have plenty of apples later in the year.

The apple trees must be quite old.

We had our lunch in the garden.

We toured the kitchen garden too. Nice onuons!

Some more flowers on our way out.

The hole in the wall is itneresting.

On our way back now through the estate at first.

Langham Hall.

Langham church.

We returned to Hunston church....

...before going a different way back to Norton. Another field that's growing well.

A friendly farmer stopped to have a chat. He has lived in Hundon for a long time.

This part of our planned route was closed...

...but we didn't have much of a detour. One final field with a different crop.

We didn't know what it is. Any ideas?

Soon after we were back at the village hall car park. The hall is closed for construction work at the moment, but the car park was full as it was school-pick-up time.

You can see more details of our 8.5 mile route (including walking around the gardens) here on MapMyWalk (or download a GPX file here) and more of my photos here on Flickr.

Thanks Joyce for leading us there and back and James for the tour of the lovely gardens.

Other related walks you can find on my blog include:

• Badwell Ash and Hunston Walk ( Oct 2020)
• Badwell Ash Walks (Nov 2020)
• Stowlangtoft Walk (Dec 2020)
• Norton Walk (June 2021)
• Norton Sunset Walk (June 2021)