Attleborough to Dickleburg

May 20, 2024

south-ish after a train ride from March

March is one of the places to visit on my ride chiefly because its library has the local newspaper on microfilm and I want to check three football game reports from the 1950s, when my late father was playing for Lincoln City.

Lincoln played the non-league club in a few benefit games for March players. I saw programmes for these on eBay a while ago, and while my father was not named, I just want to make sure, as the programmes were always printed a few days in advance and are not 100 percent accurate... I collect programmes for any games my father played in.

After taking a shower at 7:00, I wander around the sunny town centre for a while, get a coffee and breakfast snack in Costa as uniformed high school students walk past, then make my way to the nearby library before 9:30, which is when it opens. The plan is to be first through the door so that I can get on the machine for reading microfilm. I reckon an hour on it will be enough, then I can catch a train east to Attleborough and start cycling from there. That's the plan.

Many of the buildings have changed - there's now a Costa Coffee

My father is in the team photo (bottom right), but not named in the programme

The librarian shows me the machine and the rolls of microfilm stored in boxes in an adjacent cabinet and it's only just after 9:30 when I'm scrolling through the pages looking for the report for the first game, played on April 11th, 1956. Within a few minutes she comes back and explains that the machine has already been booked and the man has now turned up. He's booked it up till noon. What a pain.

With a couple of ours to kill, I decide to do some more exploring. There's a church on the south side of March that sounds interesting - the poet Sir John Betjeman once said that the woodwork to its roof of it was "worth cycling forty miles into a head wind" to see. Well, St Wendreda's is not even a mile from the library and there's barely a breeze, so I pedal down the main road and look out for the side street to it on my right.

St Wendreda's claim to fame is its impressive double-hammerbeam 'angel roof', which has 120 carved figures - mostly angels - fixed to the trusses. Once inside, I try to get a decent photo of some of them, but they're pretty high up and it's quite dim inside.

On my cruise back into town, I call in at a couple of charity shops, then spot a bicycle shop beside the river, so pop in there and buy a spare innertube. You never know.

Victorian window in the Church of St Wendreda, March

The ice-blue building is The Cycle Shop where I buy a tube

The man leaves the library and I quickly look through a few rolls of microfilm. Only the first game in 1956 has a match report and my dad isn't mentioned. Now I know.

There's a train from March at 13.32 and I ride to the station. I'm in time to get it. It's a long, slow journey and my Casio says it's well gone 3:00 when I leave Attleborough's station and start riding up the straight Station Road into the small town.

The main street seems to be a bottleneck with a constant flow of traffic and after checking out a couple of charity shops - I buy a yellow Tour de France T-shirt - I head east and soon find myself in countryside on a quiet lane.

Selfie in my Cateye mirror on the train to Attleborough

17th Century Black Hall Farmhouse in Flaxlands

There are a few turns to make and I have to consult the screenshots on my tablet quite often. Small villages appear now and again, some with cute thatched cottages, and I take a few snaps. It's all pretty flat with lots more sky, which is blue. It feels hot.

One of the various listed buildings I've earmerked to visit is the Strike School in Burston, a village not far from today's destination. The school was built with donations after the teacher at the nearby school was pushed out from her job by the people in charge - mostly landowners - who objected to her dedication to the wellbeing of her pupils.

Following her dismissal, most of the children refused to attend classes and instead she taught them on the village green. Word soon spread around the country and funds were raised to construct a proper school building. By 1917, the Strike School was finished and it now stands as a museum. I ride past the original red-brick on the way.

Round tower to St Mary the Virgin Church, Gissing

I follow a lane from Burston then get on a track, which is rough with quite a few muddy puddles. It's not very long - maybe 10 minutes - before I'm riding into Dickleburg where I was two years ago. On that occasion, my two friends were not home as expected, so we didn't get to see each other - I ended up getting a train to Norwich and staying in a hotel there.

Pam is in the kitchen preparing an asparagus pie for dinner when I arrive and her husband Dave soon appears - he's pushing a wheelbarrow up the village's main street just as we go to find him at their allotment. It's been 14 years since we last saw one another, but we chat like it was only last week and get through a bottle of wine. There's a lot of catching up to do.

Today's ride: 30 km (19 miles)
Total: 490 km (304 miles)

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