Stour Valley Path
The Stour Valley Path is a 60-mile route, running from Newmarket in Suffolk to Cattawade near Manningtree in Essex. Don't confuse it with the Stour Valley Way, which is mostly in Dorset (and which looks lovely - a walk for the future perhaps) and the Stour Valley Walk which is in Kent (which is probably also nice, but about which I can find less information)! The profusion of similarly named paths is as a result of the profusion of rivers Stour (from the celtic for 'strong'). According to Wikipedia, in addition to Suffolk, Dorest and Kent, Warwickshire and Worcestershire each have a River Stour.
So we're interested in the 'Suffolk Stour' here. This actually rises in Cambridgeshire before running for 47 miles through Suffolk, sometimes forming the border with Essex. It passes gems such as Clare, Cavendish, Long Melford, Sudbury, Bures, Nayland, Stratford St Mary and Dedham. Past the end of the Stour Valley Path, the river (now tidal) flows on to Harwich, where it joins the North Sea. There is lots more information about the river in Vernon and Joan Clarke's book, 'The Stour from source to sea, and tributaries'.
The Stour is an attractive river, but the path frequently wanders away from it, crossing the rolling countryside that inspired many landscape painters including John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. The medieval buildings are also memorable. The famous village of Lavenham is slightly to the north, but there are attractive buildings in many of the other towns and villages. The wealth of the area came from wool and the route passes several massive 'wool churches' as well as the stately homes of Kentwell Hall and Melford Hall.
The Dedham Vale AONB and Stour Valley Project publish a guide to the Stour Valley Path [in 2019, available to download or to purchase from http://www.dedhamvalestourvalley.org/stour-valley-path/]. The path is well signposted, with pretty yellow markers, and we already had the OS 1: 25000 map (Explorer Sheet 210 'Newmarket & Haverhill') which covers the first 25 miles or so of the path. The rest of the route (apart from the final tiny fraction of a mile) is all on Sheet 196 'Sudbury, Hadleight and Dedham Vale', so you only need two maps for the whole route. Parts of the route coincide with other long distance footpaths; soon after leaving Newmarket we repeated a brief section that we also walked on the Icknield Way Path and between Long Melford and Flatford Mill there were several long sections that were shared with the St Edmund Way.
We walked the path in six legs, but the shortest (which we actually did as a circuit from Clare to Cavendish and back to Clare) could easily be combined with one of the adjacent legs, thus giving five legs with break points somewhere near Great Thurlow then in Clare or Cavendish, Sudbury and Stoke-by-Nayland. Indeed, walking the path in four legs would be fine if you didn't need to allow too much time for travelling. We travelled to and from home at the beginning/end of each our first three legs (in April/May 2012) and then walked the rest of the path, from Cavendish (shown) to Cattawade, over one long weekend in July, staying in a hotel in Sudbury and then the wonderful Poplars Farmhouse near Stoke-by-Nayland.
Between our first and last legs of the Stour Valley Path we had a long weekend in the Peak District for our son's wedding, walked the next section of the South West Coast Path and visited Shetland. The fact that we had good weather for all of these trips conceals the fact that the weather in the East of England for most of the spring and early summer was truly dreadful, so it was something of a leap of faith to book a three day walking holiday for late July. We were extremely lucky - it was dry for the whole time and got increasingly warm. It was still damp and muddy underfoot in places, but I had expected to be paddling or diverted by floods, and this didn't happen. Everywhere was wonderfully green and lush, with pretty wildflowers (though the fields of yellow oil seed rape, so prevalent at the beginning of the path, had turned to the brown 'seed' stage). The logo for the Stour Valley Path is a dragonfly and there were dragonflies and butterflies in abundance - though unfortunately the warm weather had also brought out the biting insects!
For more photographs of our walk along the Stour Valley Path click here.
