July 1, 2012
Suffolk - Bury St Edmunds
down to lovely Lavenham
The weather isn’t looking too brilliant, so venturing north up to Scotland is a no-no. Instead I tell Debbie it’ll be better to get a train south and explore Suffolk and Norfolk, a relatively quiet part of the UK and a place that has a network of rural back roads. It'll be dry there.
Sunday is always a bad day for train travel and delays are to be expected as maintenance work is often scheduled. It doesn't help that we have a long wait for our connection in Newark - enough time for us to ride around the town and grab a coffee in Starbucks.
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It takes ages, but the good news is the sun comes out as we ride away from Bury St Edmond’s train station and we soon cruise into the town centre, cruise by the famous Greene King brewery and stop at the cathedral.
We wander around outside the tall facade for 20 minutes, taking a few snaps of the cut and carved blocs of stonework, with adjacent buildings made with split pebbles, before making our way out of town. We've got some riding to do.
We get a bit lost, ending up at a petrol station where we buy a couple of sandwiches and after getting directions, retrace our wheel tracks and ride out on a main road, keeping a lookout for a turning that will lead us to the quaint village of Hartest.
The back lane is quiet and it's getting late – around 6:00 – with the sun now low. We wonder where we’ll sleep. It's rural.
A steep hill drops us down into the village - apparently the steepest in the county - and a large green forms the centre and we look around it edge for the house that Patterson drew.
It's more difficult to identify than expected because over the decades improvements and modifications have been made -many roofs have been re-thatched, windows replaced, some cottages joined together to make sizeable homes - but eventually we locate it.
The trees in the sketch are not there, while others have grown and the couple of quaint cottages Patterson loosely sketched now appear to be one house. There's a fancy car parked out front.
After taking a photo I post a snap of the original drawing through the letter box and we set off towards Sudbury, back up the steepest hill in Suffolk.
Lavenham is another spot Patterson visited and that's our goal.
We can soon see the village's 15th century church sticking up across fields of wheat, its tall, square clock tower staring back at us, with the suns rays lighting up the pale stonework, giving it a golden glow.
Back in the 15th and 16th centuries, the town was rich, with weavers producing wool cloth. In the historic centre, surrounded by cute houses dating back hundreds of years, is the timber-framed Guild Hall, a wonderful, white-painted structure - testament to the wealth the cloth makers once generated.
We pedal around the small streets, searching for the gabled house that Frank Patterson drew and after nearly an hour, we still haven’t found it. In the end we stop a postman who should know the spot and show him the print, but he shakes his head and tells us that some of the old houses were bought by Americans long ago – they got dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic.
There're a couple of places to stay and I tell Debbie it’ll be at least 80 quid a night here, what with it being so pretty. The first place I ask quotes me around that, and after looking me up and down - unimpressed with my cycling gear - the woman says they're full.
Across the road is The Swan, an ancient timber-framed inn that's clearly not going to be any cheaper and it isn’t – 90 quid – but I decide to go for it. Sod the money
Debbie doesn’t quite see it like that and is not too happy about splurging out. The rest of the evening passes in near silence.
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