Don’t Panic! (we’re not Doooomed!)

Anglesey Abbey

Anglesey Abbey: it’s not in Anglesey and it was never an abbey…

There was a priory here until the Dissolution of the Monasteries and parts of the original structure still survive in the house we see today. The National Trust present this as the home of Lord Fairhaven, the last owner. He was “new money” (his mother was American and inherited a fortune from her father, industrialist and financier Henry Huttleston Rogers) so there were no complicated family trees to follow here.

Anglesey Abbey has some nice woodland gardens, perfect for an autumnal stroll:

It’s a real pity that we weren’t able to see any of the upstairs of the house; once again (as at Wimpole a few days ago), the National Trust had closed the first floor citing a lack of volunteers. Ditto the mill in the grounds: you couldn’t go upstairs when we visited as they only had one volunteer available and fire regulations apparently stipulate that they need another volunteer posted at the furthest point from the exit. The bookshop was selling a book titled “Treasures from Lord Fairhaven’s Library at Anglesey Abbey” but we hadn’t been able to see that either. So all in all, there was a sense of disappointment…..

Hopefully, the remaining National Trust properties we’re planning to visit on this trip will be fully “open” as indicated on their website!

Denny Abbey and the Farmland Museum

This wasn’t on our plan for the day, but as we had less to see than we’d anticipated at Anglesey Abbey, we stopped off to look at Denny Abbey and the Farmland Museum on our way to Ely. I’d been here before but it was Mark’s first visit.

Denny Abbey ended up being used as a farmhouse for centuries following the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It’s an interesting mix of the two: arches bricked up, bits of stone columns and carving surviving inside etc.

Mark loved the Farmland Museum. He can look at bits of old metal for hours on end! The sugar beet machinery had him stumped at first, though 😉 To be fair, many of the displays were really interesting – a wheelwright’s workshop, basket weaving, a reconstruction of a local shop etc.

Overnight: Heatherbield CL near Ely

We’d booked two nights at Heatherbield CL which is a couple of miles outside Ely.

I’d tried to stop off at Ely last time I was in this area (on a solo trip; Mark was away on a motorbike trip in the Pyrenees) but had failed miserably to find anywhere even vaguely suitable to park SOK. The car parks were all quite small and extremely busy, with cars circling on the lookout for available spaces. So I’d given up…..

Our cunning plan this time was to stay at Heatherbield and walk into Ely.

What a beautiful CL! £17 a night felt like very good value for this standard of facilities.

Everything here is SO well thought out… The shed on the left in the photo below is a little information hut containing all the information we needed to plan our day out in Ely. The shed on the right has a sign on it saying “toilet”.

I’d just assumed that this would be your usual dark little shed full of spiders. Mark, of course, went to take a look and came back insisting that I check it out. Wow! There are even toiletries in the shower!

The owner then appeared bearing a tray of cupcakes! Apparently she normally does tea and cake when people arrive but isn’t able to at the moment due to covid restrictions, so she was doing the rounds of the site delivering! In general discussion, we found out that the little wall in the shower is a design feature – she had memories of the difficulties of trying to shower small children on campsites without getting completely drenched herself, so they’d designed this to hopefully make it more easily possible.

You really can’t fault the care and attention to detail. We’d most definitely go back.

Ely

Walking into Ely from Heatherbield proved to be very easy. There’s a pavement all the way (a bit narrow for cycling but fine for walking) and it took us just under an hour to amble into town.

Our first stop was Oliver Cromwell’s house. He moved here from nearby Huntingdon in 1636 when he was in his late 30s with a wife and several children, taking on the job of tithe collector for the church behind the house. The family lived in this house for ten years; it’s the only house that Oliver Cromwell lived in that’s still standing, apart from Hampton Court.

It wasn’t expensive to get in and it was reasonably interesting, giving us a summary of his life and career.

As well as a good wander round the town, we also had a look at Ely Cathedral. They do a couple of different tours (Octagon and West Tower) but as this was our first visit, we just went for the standard visit (which cost £8 each and let us explore all of the ground floor).

There was actually a lot to see in the cathedral. We spent ages hunting “green men” among the intricate carvings (a leaflet gave clues as to their location) but with very little success. It did mean that we had a lot better look than we might otherwise have done at the detail of a lot of the carvings though.

The Octagon is amazing. The original Norman tower in the middle of the cathedral collapsed in 1322 (the cathedral was completed in 1081, so it had lasted 200+ years before disaster struck). It was replaced by a huge octagonal stone tower with a central oak lantern on top. Incredible.

I’ve made a note to book onto an Octagon Tour next time we’re in Ely. There’s also a stained glass museum at the cathedral that we didn’t have time to visit this trip.

In the above photo you can also see the 15th century hammer-beam roof of the transepts with flying angels (the featured image for this post is a close-up).

Grimes Graves

Grimes Graves is another site that I’d visited on a previous trip but that was new to Mark. It’s a flint mining site dating back to around the same time as Stonehenge.

Each on the depressions in the landscape is a pit; once the Neolithic miners had finished with a particular pit, it would be filled with spoil, leaving the bumpy surface we see today. It does look like a WW1 battlefield.

One pit is open to visitors; you climb down ladders inside the structure below. The neolithic miners dug down to the third layer of flint (layers formed during periods when the land here was a sea bed); this is a very dark (almost black) flint with very few impurities and would have been very sought-after both for its strength and its appearance when polished.

At the bottom of the pit shaft, the miners dug horizontal galleries, removing the target band of flint at floor level. In the photo below you can just see a dark band of flint between the wall and floor surfaces at the bottom of the mine.

It’s an amazing site, well worth visiting. Apparently there are plans to develop the visitor experience further; hopefully this will result in lots more visitors to Grimes Graves.

Bury St Edmunds

From Grimes Graves we drove south to Bury St Edmunds (reminder to my future self: the Tesco car park at Bury St Edmunds isn’t the most motorhome-friendly, with no double spaces and only a few places with space behind to overhang) and scampered out for a quick look around before it went dark.

Above is the gatehouse to St Alban’s Abbey. This was trashed by rioting locals in 1327AD and rebuilt twenty years later. We didn’t find out what exactly the monks had done to upset the townsfolk to that extent.

The site of the abbey itself is occupied by a really nice park (Abbey Gardens). We didn’t have time to fully investigate all of the scattered bits of ruin in there as the park closed at 5pm. Next time!

We also need to return to look at the interior of St Edmundsbury Cathedral (on the left in the photo above). The Norman Tower, on the right in the photo above, dates back to 1120AD and acts as a bell tower for the cathedral.

Above is St Mary’s Church, just on the other side of Abbey Gardens, which we also want to look inside on our next visit. Apparently, the tomb of Mary Tudor (the sister of Henry VIII) is near the high altar.

The churchyard contains a memorial to a certain Martha Gosnold, after whom Martha’s Vineyard in the USA is named, and a memorial to 17 “protestant martyrs” killed in Bury St Edmunds during the reign of Mary I (Henry VIII’s daughter, the niece of the Mary Tudor buried in the church).

Overnight: Ram Meadow Car Park, Bury St Edmunds

This car park in central Bury St Edmunds has four designated motorhome parking places. It costs £3 to park for the day and £1 overnight. The only noise was people chatting as they walked back to the main park of the car park – from about 11pm silence reigned.

All good – we’ll be back!

Thetford (aka Walmington on Sea)

We were up bright and early this morning to drive from Bury St Edmunds up to Thetford (stopping on the way to fill up with LPG at a fuel station on the main road just south of Thetford town centre).

We had half an hour on arrival for a cursory look at Thetford Priory – yet another place we need to revisit in future for a closer look. Another English Heritage site, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is nearby but closed at the moment for conservation, so we can have a look at that at the same time.

We had to dash as were booked onto a Dad’s Army walking tour. I wasn’t born when Dad’s Army made its TV debut in 1968, but I remember avidly watching later series – and being quite surprised that my grandparents could find a comedy programme set during WW2 so side-splittingly funny.

The tour started at the Burrell Steam Museum, where Corporal Jones’ van is housed.

Then off we went around town for an entertaining tour of the different sites used for filming various episodes. Of course, we’ll now have to rewatch all of the available episodes to see what we recognise!

Mark with a life-size statue of Captain Mainwaring (apparently he really was that small):

A mural near the Dad’s Army Museum:

The tour ended at the Dad’s Army Museum, so we had a good look around there before heading off to complete our practical task for Sunday afternoon:

Laundry – Icknield Way, Thetford

A launderette to remember – plenty of machines and good parking outside on a wide but very quiet road.

It wasn’t expensive either – £5 to wash for a large machine (standard machines were £3.50) then £2.50 to dry.

From here, we have a drive of an hour or so east to Framlingham. Mark’s over-excited. All his brain seems to be able to access at the moment is phrases such as “Don’t Panic, Mr Mainwaring”, “We’re Dooooooomed”, and “Don’t Tell him, Pike”. Hopefully he’ll calm down in time for Framlingham Castle tomorrow….