Reinterred: Helmingham Walk

Today we had a walk starting and finishing at Helmingham Hall.

This was the invite from Joyce.

"Thursday May 29th Helmingham Hall is the focus this week and it’s my new favourite place. Why you might ask? The estate has some lovely public footpaths. It is a deer park. It has a coffee shop and a few gifts shops too. We are allowed to use the estate car park, as long as we use the coffee shop – so pls come prepared to buy a drink/snack. Like all my walks, I am intending on showcasing the area but you may wish to explore their gardens after the walk or return at a later date. Admission is £9 I think. I am going back next week with my mum. Let’s meet at the car park at Helmingham, Stowmarket, IP14 6EF at 10.15am for drinks. My circular walk is actually only 7 miles with plenty of nature to see (I saw a fox, red deer stag and more last week). The pub isn’t open Thursday lunchtime so if it’s a warm day bring food and packed lunch. Come and explore a really beautiful area. "

This was our route. We went anti-clockwise.

Here are a few of my photos. Alas I appear to have accidentally changed a setting on my camera that means some of them appear a bit over-exposed. Sorry about that.

Here is the sign at the gate.

The first thing I noticed was the old trees in the park. It was interesting to compare them to what we had seen at Staverton Park recently. (see here). This one was especially impressive. Some in the park are up to 900 years old.

No Dawn, we don't need any more plants right now!

We assembled in the Wright's tea-room.

Getting ready to go, we could see lots of swallows flying about. And what is everyone looking at here?

This is one of the several nests in the eaves of the tearoom building.

Off we go through the park.

We came to this bridge, although we weren't going to cross it.

Somehow it didn't make it to the blog, but I did a Suffolk Walking Festival Walk here led by the head gamekeeper and I remember him telling us the curly bits on the ends were used as toilets.

We came across a group os slender fallow deer.

There used to be a huge stile, 7 feet high, here where there is now a gate.

We turned back towards the house and came closer to the deer we had seen.

There is an obelisk by a lake.

As I quoted on a previous post... "In the archives there are reports of the Mound being used by the Helmingham Volunteers to practise their musketry during the Napoleonic Wars, but the Monument itself was constructed in about 1860, from the bricks of an ornamental seventeenth-century walled arboretum on the site, which had fallen into disrepair." ..and, from here, "Obelisk, c.1860. About 20m high and standing on a mound about 7m high. Red brick. A square plinth about 2.5m high has a square sinking in each face. The needle-formed obelisk rises without interruption, tapering to a width of 0.5m at the head. A prominent landscape feature in the centre of Helmingham Park. The mound was part of an C18 wilderness garden; a summerhouse of c.1760, together with a brick wall, was demolished and the bricks reused in the obelisk. Included as Grade I in the H.B.M.C. Register of Historic Parks and Gardens."

There is a good view of the Hall and church from here.

Helmingham Hall has been home of the Tollemache dynasty since the 15th century. "When John Tollemache first started work on Helmingham in 1480, it was built in traditional half-timbered style with an overhang to the upper floor both out and inside the courtyard. Since then there have been a number of changes in external appearance, but the basic form of a courtyard manor house still remains, as do many of the original brick chimneys". Read more about it here. We didn't get close enough to see it, but the Hall has 60' moat and two drawbridges which "have been pulled up every night since 1510, making Helmingham Hall an island by night".

We descended and carried on...

...passing more deer on our way through the park.

Out into the countryside now, passing the Old Forge first.

At this house we found a stationery shop...

...and a fridge full of eggs for sale.

Everything is so green at the moment.

The ox-eye daisies are doing well.

We stopped here for our lunch break on the grass.

Returning to Helmingham, we stopped at St. Mary's Church, which has existed since at least 1258

As Simon Knott tells us... "The construction was largely of the late 15th and early 16th Centuries, but there are are no aisles, no clerestory, and all in all this is a church built for the benefit of a great landed family rather than at the expense of wealthy parishioners competing to elaborate a church. "

"Apart from the beautiful tower, the most striking feature is what appears to be a dormer window to the rood along the south side of the nave. It was installed to accommodate a very large Tollemache memorial. And this is perhaps the key thing about this building today, for it memorialises more than any other Suffolk church the dead of a single family."

I noticed in the graveyard that, unlike what we saw a few weeks ago at St Mary's Farnham with Stratford St. Andrew (see here), the footstones have been left at the ends of the graves.