Chimneys, Chips, a Burial and Barrage Balloons

From Thetford, where we ended our last post, we drove in a generally south-easterly direction to Framlingham.

Our original choice of CL, at Framlingham itself, had already closed for the winter so we’d booked three nights at Hacheston, about three miles away, instead.

Overnight: Garnetts Gardens, Hacheston

The CL was next to Garnetts Garden Centre, which was fine, and the road, which wasn’t so great. It’s one of those minor roads that seems to get busy between about 6.30 and 9.00 in the morning.

The road noise woke me up the first morning but by the third morning I’d got used to it.

The people there were extremely friendly and welcoming, and at just £12.50 a night with electricity, the price did seem very fair for what they were offering. The bit of road noise in the morning wouldn’t stop us going back.

Framlingham Castle (English Heritage)

Framlingham Castle was built in the late 12th century for Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk on the site of an earlier castle the family had built after the Norman conquest.

The first few hundred years of the castle’s history involve it being repeatedly confiscated by royalty to punish Bigod misdemeanours, then later being sold or given back to them. The names change but the story stays the same….

Not a huge amount of the original 12th century castle survives on the inside. The red building in the photo above was built as a workhouse in the 1660s and the two buildings to the right added in subsequent decades on the sites of the original north range and great hall.

Chimneys seem to be a thing at Framlingham. We were told that the 12th century stone chimneys in the photo above are the “earliest surviving examples in the country”. The earliest examples of chimneys in general (seems unlikely)? stone chimneys? or something more specific? We weren’t sure.

The brick chimneys on top, together with similar brick chimneys added on top of all the castle towers, were added in Tudor times under the Howards, relatives of the Bigods.

Each chimney has a different design and only three of them were actually functional.

You do have to wonder what possessed them to slap brick chimneys on top of a 12th century castle? If only Grade 1 listing had been invented sooner…..

The town of Framlingham was smaller than I’d expected but had a good selection of shops (including a charity shop that yielded a haul of six books!). They do seem very proud of local lad Ed Sheeran (fair enough; he’s done well for himself). We noted two life-sized cardboard cutouts plus a “knitted Ed” in one of the shops, and that was without particularly looking….

Southwold

Tuesday took us to Southwold for a day out at the seaside. Southwold was chosen as it had a recommended fish & chip shop, and no UK motorhome trip is complete without a trip to a chippy!

There was plenty of motorhome-suitable parking at the East Quay car park:

First things first, we thought we’d better shift a few calories, so went for a 3.5 mile jog.

After a shower it was time for a wander into town. Southwold has plenty of colourful beach huts, a pier, and a lighthouse positioned somewhat strangely in the middle of the town.

There were lots of cute shops, eating establishments etc. All very lovely on a warm sunny day in October. You do have to wonder how hellishly busy it gets during the main summer season though.

These cannon, complete with Tudor roses, were possibly captured at Culloden and given to Southwold by English forces on the way back to London.

We’ve all done it – acquired a souvenir, lugged it most of the way home, then wondered why we’d bothered / what we were going to do with it anyway.

Finally, the main attraction – Mrs T’s Fish & Chips….

Mark wondering where to start:

It was very good but the Magpie at Whitby still wears the crown…..

Orford Castle (English Heritage)

After three nights at Garnetts Garden Centre, we left on Wednesday morning and drove the short distance down to the coast at Orford.

Henry II ordered Orford Castle to be built in 1165, the only castle he had built from scratch. Basically, he’d figured out that the Bigods were a bunch of trouble-makers and that he’d better have a castle near Framlingham to keep them in check.

(Hugh Bigod had only just bought Framlingham back from Henry after a previous falling-out. Then in 1175, Henry was sufficiently pi**ed off with the Bigods that he ordered Framlingham Castle to be dismantled. The Bigods got the site back in 1189, after which the current castle, which we’d visited on Monday, was built).

It’s a lovely castle, with a circular keep and rectangular towers.

Designed to be self-sufficient in case of siege, it had everything – even a bakery on the roof.

This is the great hall:

A very cute chapel:

From the top of the tower we got a good view across the town of Orford to Orford Ness, which is the “largest vegetated shingle spit in Europe” according to the National Trust, who look after it.

We could clearly see the “pagodas”, used for experimental work during the development of the atomic bomb.

It is possible to visit Orford Ness but you do have to book in advance and tickets (which involve a boat trip across from the quay in Orford) sell out very quickly; we’ll have to try to factor it into a future trip.

Rendlesham Forest (Forestry England)

After a look round the small town of Orford, we drove a few miles to Rendlesham Forest where we went for a jog round the very well signposted Tang Trail.

This was, we were told, 6 miles in length. The heavens opened after 5.9 miles. “Not to worry”, we thought, “no point getting our jackets out now as the car park’ll be just around the next corner”.

They lied. Even after taking a short cut into the car park at the end, my Garmin says we jogged 6.84 miles, so we reckon the “official” route would’ve been almost 7 miles. Are Forestry England working in nautical miles, we wonder?

Overnight: Butley Village Hall

What a nice little place! £10 a night including electricity.

Butley is only a couple of miles down the road from Rendlesham Forest. You book in advance and pay direct to the Village Hall back account. Couldn’t be simpler.

(There’s also a sign up saying that you can use the water and disposal facilities for a suggested donation of £5 if you’re not staying overnight.)

We parked at the front of the building but we think the idea is that you can park on the grass at the side. The electricity points there are normal (outdoor) 3 pin plugs, so you need an adapter with you to connect up.

At the front of the building where we parked, there are two “normal” EHU sockets, although one is apparently allocated for use by an electric van. There was no sign telling us this but one of the helpful ladies showing up with yoga mats under their arms at 6pm on Wednesday evening soon put us straight and got us to shuffle a bit to the left in the photo above so that the electric van could get in next to the power point when it arrived for the night.

Sutton Hoo (National Trust)

Thursday’s destination was Sutton Hoo. I’ve been before (a few years ago; I knew that the exhibition had been revamped since my visit). This was Mark’s first visit and one of the main reasons that he’d suggested East Anglia as our destination for this trip.

This is pretty unique in England: a 7th century ship burial. We could see definite parallels with Gamla Uppsala in Sweden, but this was an Anglo-Saxon not a Viking burial. Truly extraordinary stuff and surely a must-visit.

The new exhibition building is very modern and shiny indeed:

It’s all very flash but I have to say that I did quite like the somewhat dated old museum and I thought there was more information content in the old museum (although the new one does of course do a good job of emphasizing how important women were in Anglo-Saxon society etc etc…. issues around ethnicity and gender identity will no doubt be addressed in special exhibitions in due course).

I also noted that the emphasis has changed: we now seem to be saying that the ship burial WAS King Raedwald, rather than that it was someone very important and might even have been King Raedwald. Marketing, eh wot……

It struck me that the super-bling replicas in the new exhibition don’t really give any sense of what the “real” stuff in the British Museum looks like. I’d have liked to have seen a “this is what it looks like now” replica helmet next to the shiny “this is what it might originally have looked like” version below:

Thankfully, they did have a display case showing artefacts from a more recent excavation of another mound. Hopefully this does convey the idea that the stuff doesn’t come out of the ground sparkling.

A display in Tranmer House, where the owner of the land lived when the ship burial was excavated in 1939, showed my favourite item on exhibit at Sutton Hoo – a ship rivet.

The National Trust have spent money on other things in their revamp. I’m not sure about a big boat sculpture that kids aren’t allowed to climb on (shiny new cafe and shop behind)….

A more useful expenditure was a viewing tower next to the burial site, opened just last month. This does give you a better overview of the lumpy bumpy landscape of burial mounds.

Sutton Hoo is only a short drive from Butley, so we’d booked a second night back at Butley Village Hall.

Landguard Fort (English Heritage)

Today’s destination was Landguard Fort near Felixstowe.

The first fort here dated back to the 1540s under Henry VIII and was one of a number of forts guarding the Felixstowe and Harwich sides of the estuary.

The current buildings are more recent. A pentagonal fort was built in the 1740s with arrowhead-shaped bastions. In the 1870s, one “point” was removed and replaced by a huge gun battery facing out across the estuary:

We couldn’t quite believe how much there was to see here given that English Heritage only charge £5.50 entrance fee. Normally, the entrance fees seem expensive to us and we wonder how many people actually pay them (ie how many non-members actually visit). Landguard Fort, in contrast, seemed remarkably good value.

The location is right next to the modern container port. On the other side is a nature reserve at Landguard Point. We were going to have a look at this, but the heavens opened just a couple of minutes after we got back to SOK from the fort. With no sign of the rain abating, we abandoned the plan. Next time…. There’s also the Felixstowe Museum to visit in a neighbouring building.

There were interesting bits and pieces to discover from all kinds of periods in the fort’s life.

The photo below is of a 38 ton gun installed during Victorian modernisations (this design of gun was in service between 1870 and 1909). Modern armour-plated ships required bigger guns to fire at them! Next to the gun is a shell of the type the gun would have fired.

We learned that the fort also became a “submarine mining establishment” in the 1870s. I, for one, had no idea what a submarine mining establishment was…. It turns out that in Victorian times, important ports and harbours were often defended using mines, which could be floating or sitting on the sea bed.

Spherical or barrel-shaped mines filled with gun-cotton (which we learned about at the marvellous Devil’s Porridge Museum on our last Scottish trip) were transported by narrow-gauge tramway to a jetty, where special mine-laying boats would take them out into the estuary. All of the mines were connected by armoured electrical cable back to the fort and would either be detonated automatically or, in the case of the mines on the sea bed, manually once a target ship was above the mine.

Moving on to the Second World War, we learned something about barrage balloons (there’s one folded up in a box on the floor in the room in the photo below). Apparently, some barrage balloons at Harwich came unmoored in a gale in 1940 and ended up taking out the power supply in Malmö and Göteborg (Sweden). From an accident, an idea was born. Between 1942 and 1944, Operation Outward released almost 100,000 balloons from Landguard Fort, some carrying incendiaries and some trailing steel wires to damage power lines. The balloons were very cheap to produce and caused havoc.

Mark in the WW2 gas decontamination shower room. “It’s OK”, he said “I’m wearing a mask”:

There was a suggestion that the control room at Landguard Fort might have played an important role had London been knocked out during the Cold War. We saw some Cold War public information films that were almost comical in their suggestions of what action the public should take in the event of a nuclear attack. Yep, get off your bicycle and lie in a ditch, that’ll work… Don’t look at the explosion, it might blind you? Least of your problems at that point, I’d have thought….

Overnight: Ardleigh Caravan and Camping Park

We’ve driven half an hour or so from Felixstowe in the direction of Colchester to our next stop, Ardleigh Caravan and Camping Park (a Camping and Caravanning Club CS). We’ve got two nights here so we get a full day tomorrow to go and visit “Constable Country”.

It’s all very clean and tidy here and £15 a night seems very fair for the facilities. The information hut IS pretty devoid of information at present, but we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt and blaming covid….

That’s all for now, folks…..