We spent the weekend in East Anglia - mostly in the rain :-)
On Saturday we visited
Walton-on-the-Naze, a small seaside town where I had helped run a children's holiday club as a student in late 1980's. After 20 years there wasn't that much I recognised, but the pier and the Naze Tower hadn't changed much.
Here's a picture of us sitting at the end of the pier.
We spent Saturday night in
Harwich, a busy container port on the Thames estuary.
On Sunday morning we travelled to
Flatford Mill. This is where
John Constable (1776 - 1837) painted a number of his famous landscape pictures - his parents living in the village.
The picture in the left shows where '
The Hay Wain' picture was painted. The hay wain has gone, of course, but the cottage shown in his painting is still there.
Most of the trees there today were not there when he painted his pictures, but it is easy to recognise many of the places he made famous.
On Sunday afternoon we visited
Sutton Hoo, the site of an Anglo Saxon cemetery where a 7th century ship was burried. The site contains a number of burial mounds which were excavated from tthe 1930's onwards. The most famous one contained the remains of what is believed to be King Raedwald of East Anglia.
Also found at the site is the helmet, shown reconstructed here.
From Sutton Hoo we moved onto
Mildenhall where we spent our final night.
On Monday we visited the recreated Anglo-Saxon village at
West Stow Country Park. A number of people were dressed up as Anglo-Saxons, cooking, weaving and working metal just as would have taken place in Anglo-Saxon times.
See more pictures of our weekend
here.
Graham
