31 Oct 2014. <GB-ENG> Cambridge, Cambs —

The Bridge of Sighs

The Kitchen Bridge

Traffic jam on the Cam

The Mathematical Bridge

A lone punter and son

Today we went to the Park and Ride at Trumpington — the only one of the five that caters for tall vehicles like ours. The trip into Cambridge is easy and quick — about 15-20 minutes. It lets you off right in the city centre, and there is ample signage to get you wherever you need to go.

Two of our aims today became 1) to go punting on the Cam 2) to visit King's College Chapel. Anything else would be sheer bonus!

We went to the tourist office in the Guildhall, where we bought a map giving a good walking tour of the centre of town — and to the punting station and to Kings! We walked the walk!

We got to the punting station and got onto a 'chauffeured' punting tour round the backs of the colleges. Our 'chauffeur' George was most entertaining — he obviously loves the old buildings and hates the new ones! But we went up as far as the Magdalene Bridge (at the site of the first bridge over the Cam — hence 'Cambridge'. At one stage there was a real traffic jam on the water. Punting is really popular. You can hire punts to take yourself around — and there were a few very inexperienced punters on the water that day!

By the way, just found out that the Kitchen Bridge (built by Robert Grumbold (1639–1720) according to designs by Sir Christopher Wren) is a single piece of limestone, cunningly carved to look like masonry —don't think it will fall down in a hurry!

King's College Chapel

The Rubens altarpiece

The organ pipes sit atop
the rood screen
between nave and choir

After 45 minutes in the Cam, we walked further, eventually getting around to King's College Chapel. This place is absolutely amazing. It's huge, and the fan-vaulted ceiling takes your breath away — it's the world's largest fan vault, estimated to weigh 1,875 tons!

Disaster has struck! 40% of today's photos have been lost, due to corruption of the memory card — but not a total disaster, as we had taken heaps! Never mind — we will reschedule in the next few days to retake what we can! This is one good thing about camper-van holidays — no deadlines!

We could only look into the Great Court at Trinity College
It's open to the public from 2 to 4, and we were too late.

In the market in the middle of town

Distance driven — today, 39 miles ( 63 km ); to date, 9,404 miles ( 15,135 km )

30 Oct 2014. <GB-ENG> Lode (Anglesey Abbey), E Cambs —

Today we went back to Anglesey Abbey, this time primarily for the gardens. It was a much nicer day for outside activities, and we had plenty of time to explore the place pretty thoroughly. There is a magnificent wintergarden, with plantings mainly of perennials and trees chosen for the colour of their bark, or their foliage, or for their scents. The place is a joy for the eyes, and as much for the nose! We're now so close to winter that this garden is at its best!

There is also an arboretum which is showing superb autumn tonings right now. There are also long avenues of conifers. The whole garden is spectacular, very much loved by the children, young parents, keen gardeners, and all the other people who come here in large number.

After this we went back into the house to try to pick up the few photos we couldn't get yesterday.

We then went to Macca's in Newmarket Road — it was packed, so we went to another about 6 miles away — it had no connectivity. So we went back to Newmarket Road, to find a lot of the crowd had departed. Two hours of internet later, we went back to our layby only about a mile away!

Distance driven — today, 13 miles ( 21 km ); to date, 9,365 miles ( 15,072 km )

29 Oct 2014. <GB-ENG> Lode (Anglesey Abbey), E Cambs —

Today we started off religiously with matins in MacDonalds, about 2½ hours of internet blogging and journal writing. Then we set off for Cambridge. We called in to Halford's for more supplies of oil before moving on to Anglesey Abbey, getting there at about 2pm, just in time to have lunch.

The weather started to deteriorate, so we decided only to look at the Abbey itself today, and to explore the grounds on a sunnier day — there are some predicted! We had to rush up to the house because, despite the National Trust clearly stating in its booklet that entry to the house ended at four, with the house itself closing at five, the locals were still apparently working on Summer time, with these events an hour earlier than published! The light was gloomy outside, even gloomier inside, but Warren managed to get a few shots to show you.

Again, this is a place that belonged to the Augustinians and, with the Dissolution of the Monasteries, fell into private hands and the buildings into ruin. The present house was built in the 17th century, incorporating what remained of the old priory. The current state of the house is due to Huddleston Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven, who bought the place with his brother as a base for shooting partridges, racing horses and nearby Newmarket and to oversee the family stud at Great Barton. He remodelled the house to house his extensive art collection.

The library is interesting, in that it contains all the 9,000 books it was built to house, including some early rarities. It also has quite a few paintings, including portraits of mainly Tudor royalty, John Constable's The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, and the shelves themselves are built from the elm-wood piles from John Rennie's Waterloo Bridge, which was demolished, despite protests, in 1934. The library is also a magnificent cheat — when you enter the room, you are overwhelmed by the sheer number of the books in there — until you realise that mirrors judiciously placed at the ends of the shelves multiply the apparent number of books manyfold!

In the Upper Gallery, built to house many of the collected artworks, there was what seemed to be an interesting installation in the middle of the room — two beds, placed end-to-end, with their headboards in the middle. Turns out, however, that renovations are starting in a couple of the bedrooms when the abbey closes next week for the winter, and these two beds have been brought out here as a far cheaper alternative to putting them into storage for the duration!

A 1910 Steinway

A Cat-a-pillar!

Part of the original abbey

This is a very strange home, difficult to come to terms with, but a good insight into the playboy lifestyle of Lord Fairhaven. The other side to the estate is its gardens, developed by Lord Fairhaven between 1930 and his death in 1966 (at which time the entire property was given to the National Trust). It was raining outside, so we left, hoping to revisit the place when the sun is shining, maybe tomorrow.

We went in towards Cambridge, where there is a nice layby near a public footpath on the A1303 (Newmarket Road), just of junction 35 on the A14.

Distance driven — today, 35 miles ( 56 km ); to date, 9,352 miles ( 15,051 km )

28 Oct 2014. <GB-ENG> Bury Saint Edmunds (Ickworth), & Thetford (King's Forest), Suffolk —

After a wonderfully quiet night in the forest, today was to be a Bury St Edmunds day. Two destinations planned — Ickworth Hall (south of the city) and the Theatre Royal (in the city itself).

We went to Ickworth, and almost immediately went on a guided tour inside the house. This basically took us through three rooms, as a 'taster' for the rest of the house. Elizabeth, our guide, knew her stuff, and went through the rooms giving us a history of the family at the same time. Ickworth was in the possession of the Hervey family since the mid-fifteenth century. The Herveys, royalists, enjoyed royal patronage under the Tudors and the Stuarts. In 1701, John Hervey, 1st Earl of Bristol, demolished the then derelict manor house, but the family only developed (and enjoyed) the gardens, living in a converted farmhouse. It was Frederick Augustus, the 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry (known as the Earl-Bishop) who started work on the hall to house his estranged family and his art collection. But he died, and it was his son Frederick William, the 5th Earl and later 1st Marquess of Bristol, who finally completed the hall. Later on the 4th Marquess married the heiress Theodora Wythes, and it was she who did considerable modernisation to the hall, installing plumbing, heating, electricity — everything that makes it a livable 20th century building. In 1956 the hall passed to the National Trust (in lieu of death duties), although the family continued to live in the east wing right up to 1996.

The front garden!

After going through the house, we planned to go in to Bury St Edmunds to visit the Theatre Royal, the only Regency theatre still functioning in the country. This was a dismal failure, as the 'free parking' the Trust said was available nearby has now become 'Residents Only Parking', and the town itself is a system of narrow one-way streets — so we gave up on this mission, and returned to Ickworth.

The entrance hall, with the statue The Fury of Athamas

Cleaning the Library chandelier

The Dining Room

A bedroom chandelier

By this time, the hall was free entry, and you could work your way round the whole place (well, those parts of it that are not private apartments!). We explored the hall for about another hour, then went out and walked down to the walled garden, which was a bit of a surprise — much of it has been planted as a wildflower meadow, and is still (approaching the end of autumn) full of flashes of colour. The walled garden is a complex of six, with the meadow behind the other five, and these last being open to the Canal Lake to the north. One section (the westernmost) is devoted to plots for the children of the Ickworth Park Primary School, two are kitchen gardens, the middle one is a lawn in front of a summer house, and the easternmost is an orchard, with plantings of dahlias and other brightly-hued flowers around the edge and up the walls. Totally delightful, and a great splash of colour as the seasons turn to grey (although today was fine and sunny, with cloudless blue skies!)

After a wonderful relaxed day at Ickworth, we returned to King's Forest for another quiet night.

Distance driven — today, 46 miles ( 74 km ); to date, 9,317 miles ( 14,995 km )

27 Oct 2014. <GB-ENG> West Stow, Bury Saint Edmunds, & Moulton, & Thetford (King's Forest), Suffolk —

Today we decided to stay in the Thetford/Bury St Edmonds area. First up — a four-day shop in Thetford. We wound up in a Sainsbury's, which had a great clothing section, so each of us bought a couple of garments for the winter — and Warren decided a small set of external speakers for the computer would make our movie-watching a little more enjoyable.

Then we went on to the West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village. Warren had found the place in the Road Atlas, and thought it worth a look-see. It certainly was! This place is the site of one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon villages in England, and has thrown up a large amount of archaeology. But this is not the whole thing — here they do what they call 'experimental archaeology'. They have built a number of structures — effectively a whole village — in possible Anglo-Saxon form — but there's no guarantee — and then they look at what they have and assess whether it is consistent with the archaeological evidence. The earliest houses, for example, were built over pits, with the roof coming down directly to ground level. The assumption here was that the Anglo-Saxons would have used the bottom of the pit as a floor, thus giving them ample head-room. This was the theory in the book Warren first read on the subject in about 1955! But this theory doesn't hold water, as the constant to-ing and fro-ing of the inhabitants in such a building inevitably brings in soils and raises the floor level, which doesn't gel with the archaeology. So now they think a floor was laid on beams above the pit, and the house would have had walls (wattle and daub, or timber slabs) and a roof (thatch), much like a lot of houses even into the Tudor period!

So the place is interesting on an archaeological level, and the museum associated with it is interesting as well. But today — don't say the Hams don't land on their feet! — they had a costume day, with many of the workers on the site coming in full costume and demonstrating the crafts they practice as part of their devotion to the site. One of the women was spinning wool on a drop spindle, wool that she was later going to knit (sew?) using Anglo-Saxon techniques. Another was a dyer, who was most forthcoming in describing her craft, and how she uses dyes and techniques true to the Anglo-Saxon period. And so it went on. The workers had all made their own authentic costumes using Anglo-Saxon techniques. And they had their children with them, all playing the scene to the fullest. They were even having parsnip and apple soup for lunch, with bread — totally authentic!

After spending a few hours here, and having lunch in the van, we went only a few miles further south-east, to the village of Moulton, where there is an interesting medieval bridge. We had to negotiate a couple of rather narrow lanes to get there, but Suzie is a wonder! The bridge is alongside a ford in the River Kennett, on the road that once the main route between Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds. The ford was dry today, but it was always available for horse-and-cart, but the packhorses had a special bridge to help them keep their loads dry. This four-arched late medieval bridge is called the 'Packhorse Bridge'.

After finding this bridge and exploring it, we retraced our path past the Anglo-Saxon Village and to a picnic area in the King's Forest, south of Thetford, and well within range of Bury St Edmunds for tomorrow. And tonight's a curry night...

The view from our van!

Distance driven — today, 33 miles ( 54 km ); to date, 9,271 miles ( 14,921 km )