Today it was Sheila's turn to lead the walk for the U3A Bury St Edmunds Longer Walks Group.
This was Sheila's invite.
"Hello everyone. I've planned a walk for next Thursday aiming to start walking around 9.30am from the The Lamarsh Lion near Bures. . ///deflect.prominent.evoke (what3words)
It's a community pub and they are happy for us to park in their car park. Hopefully some of us will enjoy a pint or tea and cake in The Lion after our walk. They said to let them know if a large group so as to ensure plenty of cake but as we are usually quite a small group it should be fine.
The walk will be around 10 miles. Hoping it's not too muddy - it was OK when I walked it recently but we will be crossing a field."
This was our route, going clockwise from Lamarsh.
Here are a few of my photos.
Assembled in the Car Park of the Lamarsh Lion and ready to go at 9:30 am. It was an interesting drive from Sudbury along the Henny Road - a single track road with passing places. For a lot of our walk today it felt we were out in the middle of nowhere.
We were soon in the countryside on a secluded path that went uphill... and further uphill, through Longspring Wood and then Parkhill Wood.
But first we stopped to admire a tree with a plaque...
There are plenty of mushrooms fruiting now - it has been a good year for them. I think this is possibly a
yellow fieldcap at an advanced stage just before starting to shrivel, but I could easily be wrong.
We stopped for drinks at the church. It was open so we were able to visit inside too.
I picked up a wonderfully detailed 33 page booklet about the church. The forward told me...
"
The original dedication of the Church has been lost in the mists of time. However a village Feast and Fair was held on the first Thursday in June
until banned altogether along with several others at the Essex Quarter
Sessions in March 1776 for encouraging drunkenness, unlawful games
and plays and other debaucheries. This would usually have been held on
or near the Saint's day of the local church and the only popular saint
fitting this requirement is Barnabas with his day of June 11th. So
perhaps the dedication of St. Barnabas in 1975 gave the Church back it's
original dedication."
Part of the church (the west end of the north wall and base of the west wall) dates back to the early 12th Century. It is worth another visit to see all the things that are mentioned in the booklet. But we had a walk to do. We headed first south-west, then west and then north towards our next small viallge - Twinstead. We saw some great autumn colours today.
At Twinstead we passed the rather unexpected 19th Century
St. John the Evangelist church without stopping to visit it.
Our path took us round a beautifully maintained garden, where we stopped to say hello to the owner.
Now we had a bit of down and up through some lovely countryside as we headed for Great Henny.
Fenn Farm is very impressive.
More lovely autumn colours.
I recognised where we were when I spotted this. We were nearing
Great Henny.
St. Mary's church which is thought to have first been built in the 11th or 12th
century and then later extended in the 14th century. The church is also
registered as a Small Place of Pilgrimage.
I remembered that there had been a problem with the church's wooden spire being attacked by woodpeckers.
Here is an online new story about it. What we could see here was a wooden decoy. The last time I was here (on
stage 6 of walking the St Edmund Way earlier this year), a local told us that, unfortunately, it doesn't work.
We had our lunch stop here. We liked to knitted poppies in the pews - it would Remembrance Sunday in a few days time.
Somebody wondered what this on top the roof was, imagining a bowman firing and arrow. But no. It is just a cross that has part of it broken off.
It wasn't far from here back to Lamarsh along the St Edmund Way, but we had an extra loop to do first with another down to Henny Street and then back up again. On the way we passed a field of borage.
We passed the
Henny Swan pub, but resisted the temptation to go in for a beer.
Across this field being ploughed we could see Great Henny church.
Ascending towards it again, we came to the St Edmund Way and followed this for the rest of our walk. We were a bit dismayed to find it crossed a field with no path, but it was dry so not muddy to walk on.
More ups and downs. I said to Ros, "Is Sheila related to the Duke of York" (as in Grand old..) She seemed to be marching us up and down hills a lot. Just kidding. It was a lovely route she had been taking us on.
We saw some red kites circling. Here is one of them.
We came to the end of our upland walking here, looking down towards Lamarsh Chruch.
Ros and Peter took advantage of the seat as we had a little respite before going down the steep hill.
We descended to the surreal looking Grade 1 listed
Lamarsh Church. As
Simon Knott's site
says, "
The top of the tower is surmounted by an elaborate octagonal
spire with fairytale dormer windows, by Arthur Blomfield. The whole
effect is of a bit broken off of a castle belonging to Mad Ludwig of
Bavaria."
Some of us stopped to look in the church. In Great Henny church we found a summary of the history of the church on table-tennis bats. The history is similarly provided on surface with a handle, but it doesn't look like any table tennis bats I've ever seen.
A short walk through Lamarsh Village, passing the village hall..
...took us back to the
Lamarsh Lion.
Having parked in their Car Park we had, of course, to go in and have a drink.
Lovely! That was a great way to finish our day before heading for home.
Thank-you Sheila for a great walk with great views and to the others of the additional company. You can find more details of our 10.4 mile route here on MapMyWalk (or download a GPX file here) and more of my photos here on Flickr.
Other related walks you can find on my blog include
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