Halesworth Walk

Today we did another "training" walk for Eastbourne, a walk of 15 1/2 miles from Halesworth to Saxmundham along the East Suffolk Lines path.

This was the invite from Joyce.

"Wednesday April 16th this will be a decent paced training walk for Eastbourne .  A very lovely linear walk from Halesworth to Saxmundham of about 15.5 miles. We will meet at Halesworth train station at 10.10am ready to start walking.  If coming from Stow/ Ipswich, you could buy a Hare Fare at £14. You will then use that from Saxmundham at the end of the walk. 

We walk 9.5 miles to Yoxford. There is a Blackdog Deli here for refreshments or bring packed lunch to eat at church.  Then the second part has some gorgeous park land back to Saxmundham. There is some road walking too. Expect a finish time of 4.30pm-5pm." 

This was our route.

We were at Saxmundham station in good time for our 9:53 train to Halesworth.

Here it is. We found Roland and Mike onboard.

It was only a short journey to Halesworth,

They have a movable platform at the station here.

Read about it here.

We set off and were soon walking through Halesworth Millenium Green along the River Blyth

Her we met up with Rachel who joined us for the walk, making 7 of us in total.

I enjoyed walking along the river for a bit.

A tunnel through the blossom. Nice!

We crossed the river at Mells an attempted a game of pooh sticks, but our sticks got stuck.

We walked along the edge of  Halesworth Golf Course.

Alexanders are blooming profusely at the moment.

Rachel took us on little detour into Grove Woods to see the bluebells. Lovely!

We came to the village of Bramfield.

Rachel and I popped into the Queen's Head for a very swift 1/2 pint of beer.

No not Queen Elizabeth, but Queen Boadicea.

The rest visited St. Andrew, Bramfield church for the drinks' stop.

Unusually, it has a detached tower.

There is a crinkle-crankle wall opposite.

A big patch of cowslips.

The rape seed flowers are fully out now.

We passed some signs in the fields, but had no time to read them, so I just photographed them.

This is a generous path through the rapeseed.  Rachel wondered where it had originated. Well according to this article, it came from India originally.

We saw some cute lambs.

We got a bit of a view here.

Is that purple tansy in the field over there? Rachel thought that maybe it was borage.

We walked along the main street of Yoxford. Plants were on sale here.

Our lunch stop was at St. Peter's Yoxford church.

I was amused by the diversion signs here. Which way were you supposed to go?

We crossed the A12 without visiting the Yoxman statue, which I've only ever glimpsed when driving past.

We got a nice view back to the church....

..as we crossed a pleasant meadow with a good-looking herd of cows.

Onwards through the countryside. Rather extraordinarily we didn't pass through any villages on the rest of ou walk back to Saxmundham.

Alas there was no pub to visit here. Rachel had been covering up the letter F.

Mike spotted a clump of rare oxlips. I had seen quite a few in Bradfield Woods recently (see here).

Nearing Saxmundham now and we were surrounded by rapeseed.

We crossed the railway line a final time.

We were soon back in Saxmundham, and half an hour earlier than advertised. Well the pace was quite high and we didn't stop much.

We left Rachel to go shopping and said goodbye to Roland and Mike at the station before heading for home.

Thank-you Joyce for the lift to and from Saxmundham and for leading us round and to everyone else too for the company.

You can find more details of our 15.4 mile route here on MapMyWalk (or download a GPX file here).

Another related walk you can find on my blog is

• Saxmundham Walk (Jul 2021)