Holiday

Spent the weekend in Suffolk at my cousin's daughter's wedding at Thorpeness - had a great time and the bride and bridesmaids looked stunning. 


Hadn't really visited Suffolk before - stayed at Laxfield which has a traditional old pub "The King’s Head (The Low House) is one of the very few pubs left in Britain that has no bar-counter. You go in the tap room at the back. Beer drinkers survey the array of barrels and request whatever takes the fancy, drawn  straight from the barrel. Before you reach the barrels, you pass through a room dominated by an ancient fireplace. Old settles, polished in parts by the backs and  bottoms of the long dead, surround it in a U-shape, with a table in the middle. Another room, also called the tap room, likewise has one large table and bench seats around. This is a social pub. If you want to be slightly less social you can go in the card room, which has small, separate tables and chairs, or the restaurant, but even there you may  get into conversation with people to whom you have not been introduced."  Bob & Linda Wilson are the owners of the pub which has been in Linda's family for most of the 20th century.  A really great place.  I see from their website that they were Adnam's Pub of the Year 2010 http://www.laxfieldkingshead.co.uk/

Travelling around Suffolk I realised what a lovely county it is.  I went walking round Dunwich and visited Lavenham on my way home

Lavenham Streetscape 

as well as the village on the Cambridgeshire/Essex/Suffolk border that my maternal ancestors came from .... 

St Mary's Church in Bartlow 

3 Maltings Cottages, Bartlow - home of my great great aunt and great aunts in the 1950s.  A new owner has sympathetically converted 1-3 into one house whilst retaining the pargetting and essential look of the three original cottage properties.

I really felt refreshed by walking and exploring the unspoilt countryside, listening to the birds and spotting signs of spring.  It occurs to me that we are really so fortunate in having such beautiful spaces within our countryside and that there have been two recent issues - the High Speed 2 train and the proposal not to bury power cables which will then cut through some of our pristine historic landscape - that I should really get involved in ... so I've joined the Council for the Protection of Rural England  http://www.cpre.org.uk/home