Last Monday we spent the day in Norfolk. The main purpose was to visit my mother, but we also managed to fit in an hour or so of being tourists.
As normal we left home about 7.30am and we had a really clear run up to Norwich. By the time we arrived the sun was burning off the overnight cloud and the day was working up to be another scorcher.
Having spent a quick 20 minutes with mother, really just to see what if any bits of shopping she needed, we scooted off to Bowthorpe: take some stuff to the good charity shop there and a quick wander round Roy’s, the local supermarket.
I’ve written about Roy’s before. They started as boat chandlers in Wroxham, on the Broads. As I recall about 40 years ago they bought the Wroxham Post Office and General Store and expanded to become Roy’s of Wroxham. They now have a small chain of supermarkets serving the local communities; they are still family owned. Their philosophy is to stock the basics and whatever they can get cheap — everything is cheap — and if it’s local so much the better. True to their origins they sell everything from frozen food to paint, insect spray to shoes. Apart from the staples you can never be sure that if you buy something there today they’ll have it next week. It is a cross between Lidl, a pound shop and a market stall — they don’t describe themselves as “the world’s largest village store” for nothing! The downside is that their fruit, salad and meat isn’t always top quality, but there are definite bargains (like our favourite packs of bacon pieces) if you shop carefully.
After Roy’s it was off for pub lunch at the excellent King’s Head at Bawburgh. We were early and by now it was hot, so it was cold soft drinks all round. It was even too hot for fish and chips or beef suet pudding! So we all settled for the most excellent Ploughman’s Lunch: craft cheese, home-cured smoked ham, home-made pork pie, granary bread, tomato, pickled onion and home-made piccalilli. It was good, wholesome and tasty; none of your plastic packet food here. It was so good we none of us wanted a pudding!
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I stopped in Bawburgh to photograph a few of the magnificent hollyhocks growing outside some of the cottages. Then on the way back to see mother for the afternoon we stopped and gathered some flowers for her to paint and a small bundle of stray corn: we found wheat, naturalised oats and naturalised barley in the field margins.
The time saved early in the day allowed us to leave mother slightly early and take advantage of the good weather with a diversion on the way home. Much as we like the section of the A11 from Norwich, by way of Thetford and Eleveden, to Mildenhall it is nice to see something different. So we followed the A47 round to Dereham, then the A1075 through Watton, rejoining the A11 near Thetford.
This was a deliberate ploy to go through the lovely village of Shipdham — literally “settlement of the sheep”, which tells you where its wealth came from — where we stopped for an ice cream and a look at the church.
All Saints, Shipdham is a rather interesting church. It clearly has Norman origins and lots of later developments, finally having been “tidied up” by the Victorians. On top of the originally 13th century tower there is a two-tier, 17th century cupola of wood covered with lead. There is a nave (totally Victorianised) and a north aisle which still has it’s early roof beams. Strangely the church has two fonts: it’s own 14th century one and a Norman font rescued from Ovington which they now use in preference to their own. It is a small delight.
Shipdham is also interesting because it was clearly quite prosperous in medieval, Tudor and Stuart times. Hence the surprisingly imposing church with a neat walled, picture-book churchyard. The village also had its own brickworks for several hundred years up until around 1820. So as well as the ubiquitous Norfolk flint there are still a number of examples of the local small, pale red bricks as can be seen in the church wall above.
If you’re going that way, Shipdham is definitely worth a quick stop.