Great Wood Hill – 128m / 420ft – 21/01/2020
We drove in the dark rush hour traffic around Norwich still without a confirmed place to stop overnight in Betty. Finally we settled on a dog friendly pub called The Fox and Hounds in the village of Thurston, near Bury St Edmunds. When we arrived the car park was too full so we had to bide our time but all was well, good food and a couple of drinks, sociable locals and staff made for a comfortable night.
We didn’t have to wait too long for space to appear for Betty and once safely parked I put the heating on as the forecast was for a sub zero night outdoors, which proved to be true. We slept warm enough and were not unduly disturbed by the noise and tremors of nearby passing freight trains. By morning the ground was white over with frost and poor Betty had taken the precaution of automatically emptying her water boiler to avoid a frozen catastrophe. I took PJ for a quick walk so he could empty his water boiler and Cath got hot bacon rolls from the sandwich shop across the road before we packed up and headed off for the first destination of the day, a small village called Chedburgh.
We wasted no time finding a disused car park opposite a disused pub, got our walking shoes on and headed for the hills… or at least the one hill… or at the very least the high point on the horizon that we could see to the south east about a mile away in the beautiful sunshine. Suffolk is flat and this walk did not look very demanding. We could have just headed off in a straight line across some empty farmland but that would have been even less fun and nowhere near my 5 miles per walk objective.
A short stretch of main road led to the hamlet of Depden where we took a footpath into some woods which brought us out by a field occupied by two friendly donkeys. Usually PJ is a little uncomfortable around larger animals but as we skirted along outside the fence the donkeys followed and love blossomed…
Things soon developed however, as a lady came striding across the field, we assumed to make sure the dog was not scaring the donkeys. Nothing of the sort – she gently admonished us for not following the public footpath directly over the stile and through the field. The path we had taken was in fact a run used for horses, sheep and probably pigs as well! So we climbed the stile and crossed the field (PJ is not brilliant with stiles but with Cath’s persuasion he leapt over). The donkeys decide not to follow now, preferring a newly brought bale of hay. Another stile was negotiated into a small enclosure of sheep who did show some interest in us but we quickly left over a third stile and across a small footbridge which led us back to the main road. We crossed the road and headed east along a lane towards a farm and a TV mast which would be in the general area of the county high point shown on OS maps at 128m. Keeping a close eye on the GPS we found a place what appeared to be at least not any lower than the land around it, stopped for photos and video then contemplated how to deal with the sudden euphoria…NOT!
Without my pre-printed maps I was working from memory a little in terms of the route back to the van however knew we needed to go past the TV/telephone mast and find a footpath across fields to a place called Rede from where we would take a country lane and then back over disused farm land to Chedburgh. And so it turned out, muddy, boggy in places, frozen in others, a mapped footpath across a field which is not really there and a brief chat with a couple of guys out walking in the sunshine. Not long later we were back at the van with 5 miles done, another top ticked off and ready for the second adventure of the day.
