Around Fritton and Somerleyton
Walked by Sally and Richard, Saturday 29th January 2011
7 miles of walking including just less than 4 miles on Angles Way
Click here for all our photos of this walk.
Our previous walk along the Angles Way took us as far as Fritton and there was no obvious way of getting between Fritton to Oulton Broad by public transport - and it seemed slightly too far to walk from Fritton and Oulton Broad and back in one day (given that we had quite a long drive to our starting point and the fact that we were walking in winter so it was getting dark by 4pm). The best solution seemed to be to split the Fritton to Oulton Broad stretch into two, enabling us to use the train between Somerleyton and Oulton Broad on the next leg. That left us with today's short leg, which we managed to turn into a circuit. It was ideal for a cold winter's day, when three hours out walking was plenty - and we managed to include both the village of St Olaves and Herringfleet Drainage Mill and the surrounding marshes; both delightful, and neither on the route of the Angles Way. It was a wonderfully atmospheric walk on a winter afternoon; I'm sure that it would be very different in summer, especially the stretches by the river, so we must return to these newly-discovered haunts at a different time of year.We turned off the A47 (Norwich by-pass) onto the A146 to Loddon, then turned right onto the B1136 to Haddiscoe and the A143 to St Olaves. In St Olaves, we turned right onto the B1074 and we followed this for around a mile to the car park by the Herringfleet Hills access land (467984). This seems to be a popular dog-walking spot and the car park was very busy, but we managed to find a space.
We walked back to St Olaves, past the gated entrances to grandly named houses e.g. Oakwell Manor, Herringfleet House - and Raty's Retreat! In St Olaves we initially turned left down to St Olaves Bridge over the River Waveney; St Olaves is an interesting place with boatyards, more grand houses (I wonder who lives here?) and the remains of a priory, dedicated to St Olaf, King of Norway.
We retraced our steps alongside the A143, climbing up off the marshes, to rejoin the Angles Way where we had left it in November, on the outskirts of Fritton. We followed a wooded and rather muddy track that is only a short distance from Fritton Lake (variously known as Fritton Decoy) and then turned left along Blocka Road, high above Fritton Lake. The Lake is surrounded by trees, so we only caught occasional glimpses of it.
We passed the entrance to Blocka Hall Farm and the gatehouse to Herringfleet Hall, then took a path on the right-hand side that ran alongside woodland, with a pretty church visible in the distance. After a few wiggles and crossing a minor road we reached the church (St Mary's Ashby), complete with its round tower and thatch. St Mary's is, as seems so frequently the case with these ancient Norfolk and Suffolk churches, completely in the middle of nowhere (and we later discovered that the population of Ashby was all of 50 at its peak), but there were a couple of benches outside the churchyard, and we stopped for lunch.
From here we followed a track south. Much of today's leg (and some of the previous and following legs) crosses land owned by the Somerleyton Estate, but we now skirted Somerleyton Hall itself and reached the curious village of Somerleyton. It's largely Estate Village (painted in the characteristic Somerleyton burgundy colour), built by Samual Morton Peto who owned and rebuilt the Hall in the 19th Century, before going bankrupt. The Hall was then bought by Sir Francis Crossley (of Crossley Carpet fame) and Somerleyton Hall is still owned and lived in by the Crossley Family. We passed the model Village Green and the Village School, which looks for all the world like a thatched cottage.
Somerleyton's other claim to fame is that it was here that Christopher Cockerell invented the hovercraft and tested his prototype. We passed the "Hovercraft column", a memorial that was unveiled on 4th June 2010, the centenary of Cockerell's birth. The column is topped by a replica of the prototype hovercroft, which looks something like a spaceship, so the whole thing, though attractive, looks vaguely like a memorial to a landing of aliens!
From Somerleyton we left the Angles Way and followed the marshes by the River Waveney to Herringfleet Drainage Mill, a working smock mill renovated and run in a partnership between the Somerleyton Estate and Suffolk County Council. From the Drainage Mill we turned away from the river, crossed the (muddy) marshes and then climbed to the higher land of the Herringfleet Hills. We crossed the access land and returned to the car. The access land and the car park were still crawling with dog-walkers but these were just about the only people we had seen on the entire walk.
