Around Fritton and Somerleyton

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.

Following leg of walk.