The Ham Nomads

21 Oct 2014. <GB-ENG> Felbrigg, & Hevingham (Forest), Norf —

Again we had picked a layby with meal service — Lenny's Grill House was set up at the end when we woke up, so Warren again had a burger for breakfast!

We then went on to Felbrigg Hall up near the top end of Norfolk, near the sea. This is a mansion from the Jacobean period which has had modifications its whole life. The Jacobean south front was built in the early 1620s, but has had numerous repairs since that time so is somewhat of a patchwork. Blickling Hall (which we are visiting tomorrow) was being built at the same time, with many of the same workmen, so there are many similarities between the two buildings. The 'New Apartments', a 'new' wing running back from its western end, are about sixty years later, and are much more unified in appearance.

The estate was in the hands of the Windham (earlier Wyndham, originally Wymondham) family from 1450 until 1863 when it was bought by a Norwich merchant, John Ketton. This was by no means the end of the Windhams with the property, as Ketton's daughter Rachel married Thomas Wyndham Cremer, a descendant of the original John Wyndham through a line of the family that had resisted the change to Windham! The last squire of Felbrigg, who never married and so had no descendants, and who was in the process of transferring the property over to the National Trust when he died in 1969, was Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer.

We went through the house, which is rich and comfortable. The last squire had taken great pains to preserve the place and left it and its furnishings intact, so the National Trust has had little to do in the way of restoration or refurnishing, and we see the place as it was actually lived in. The only real work the Trust did was to replace the ceiling of the library, where the Ketton-Cremers had been forced to replace a severely water-damaged neo-Jacobean ceiling with a plain flat ceiling. When the Trust found some surviving remnants of the original ceiling they were able to fully recreate it, with the aid of these fragments, a sketch, and two late 19th-century photographs.

After doing the Hall justice, we went outside to look at the gardens. The day wasn't exactly bright and sunny, with the winds from Hurricane Gonzalo buffeting the place, and the gardens were shutting down for the winter, but we were still able to get a feel for the place. Someone with a sense of humour has created a 'pumpkin tree' by training a pumpkin vine over the skeleton of a tree! And there is a huge dovecote here. We went into it, and were duly inspected by the one or two doves still in residence.

We finally left Felbrigg and returned to our layby in the forest at Hevingham, which has become our base of operations for the moment, being almost equidistant from all the sites we want to visit — and only 10 minutes from the Macca's at Norwich Airport!

Distance driven — today, 26 miles ( 42 km ); to date, 9,072 miles ( 14,600 km )