Reinterred: Helmingham Hall Walk

Today we had a shorter walk from Helmingham Hall.

This was the invite from Joyce.

"Thursday May 14th This walk will start from Helmingham Hall, IP14 6EF as it is shut on Fridays. We will start with coffee at 10am and walk at 10.30am. We will walk our usual 6.5 mile loop so that it suits those with poorly knees."

Poorly knees? That would be me then! This was our route today,

Here are some of my photos.

We got held up in Coddenham on the way so we had no time to visit the plant shop before the walk.

We found Roland and Erica waiting for us in the café.

After refreshing drink, the 5 of us set off through the deer park. The last time we were here, in May 2025, (see here), was shortly after we had visited the amazing old oaks at Staverton Park (see here). This one is especially impressive. Some in the park are up to 900 years old.

We spotted a flock of heritage sheep.

We passed close to this bridge. 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 on school trips.

In all we saw 3 herds of deer in the park. This is the first of them.

Her is the obelisk. 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."

As we got to the edge of the park and doubled back on a path passing close to the obelisk, the skies turned dark and it started to rain. This is the lake.

Through the rain we got a view of the hall. 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 spotted a second herd of deer in the distance and then this lot, which we enjoyed watching for a few minutes while we sheltered under a tree.

The rain soon stopped and we carried on. Here we passed the Old Forge.

Some lovely paths - here we were walking through a field of beans.

The stationery shop here wasn't open.

Among the buttercups we saw tall grasses. Joyce identified them as sorrel.

We got some sunshine for the rest of our walk.

Not far to go now.

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."