Constable Country and the Fens

It's an early start for us this morning because we need to take the train from Oxford to London then from London to Cambridge where another hire car awaits, but just for two days to allow us to explore a bit of Suffolk and Norfolk before taking a north-bound train again. 

We leave our 'interesting' accommodation at six o'clock in the morning to walk to the station for the 6:35 train to London. 

Our train delivers us to Paddington Station and we take the underground to King's Cross for the train to Cambridge. Our Eurail Passes are proving to be excellent, easy to use and great value. If you happen to miss a train you've chosen you can just delete it and choose another one. You can hop on and off as many trains as you like each day.

At Cambridge we take a taxi to the hire car place, not a great distance but it costs £25! Ouch, that's about AU$50.

We set off to visit Flatford in Suffolk where John Constable painted some of his most memorable pictures. 

Constable was born in East Bergholt in 1776. He was the son a wealthy corn merchant who owned the mill in Flatford, which is on the river between the villages of East Bergholt and Dedham. The young John walked the three miles each day from his home in East Bergholt to school in Dedham, passing on his way all the beautiful countryside of the Dedham Vale. These were the landscapes he grew to love and started to sketch at a young age. 

Bridge Cottage, Flatford

The village is administered by the National Trust and there is a visitor centre in Bridge Cottage, an old thatched cottage beside the river. We read the stories told by previous occupants of the cottage, the Clarke Family who rented it in the late 1800s. Mrs Clarke relates: “Everything goes through here [on the river] you know; bricks for the grand buildings in London, coal that powers the steam mill and flour from our mills on its way to Mistley to be loaded onto boats. Who knows how far that goes? In the evenings Isaac and I sometimes go out on the river with the eels traps. We know some good places and I enjoy the quiet for a while.” 

Bridge Cottage, Flatford. As it would have been in 1890

The Clarkes had three children and Mr Clarke worked at the flour mill owned by Constable's father one hundred years previously.

The Mill at Flatford

In the tiny village we see Willy Lott's Cottage, the subject of The Hay Wain, one of Constable's most recognisable works. We eat our lunch looking across the river to the mill and wander past the dry dock, both of which became Constable's subjects.

Willy Lott's Cottage, featured in Constable's painting The Hay Wain

The village is still much as it was 250 years ago in Constable's time, visitors' cars are out of sight in a car park and the village itself is not on a public road. A peaceful place to visit.

A quiet street in Flatford

Our next stop for the day is Wicken Fen, another area in the care of the National Trust. Wicken Fen is one of only four remaining wild fens in this area of East Anglia known as the Great Fen Basin. A modest two acres was acquired by the National Trust in 1899, the first nature reserve to come under their protection. They purchased adjoining land as it became available and the reserve now covers an area of around 800 acres with further additions planned for the future. Although Wicken Fen is deemed a wild fen, it is not in its natural state. The aim is to maintain it as a working fen, much as it would have been in medieval times. It is a haven for wildlife, insects and plant species, all of which have adapted over hundreds of years to the management practices of fen farming. At Wicken, sedge is harvested and sold for thatching; Konik Ponies—that originated in Poland—and Highland cattle graze marshland to control scrubby plants.

We pay up and walk around the boardwalk of Sedge Fen, the display fen where there are hides for viewing the birdlife and an old refurbished timber windmill used for pumping water onto the water-loving sedge fields.

Sedge at Wicken Fen

Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire

We have time to walk further into the outer areas of the fen and we're enjoying this wild place so much that we don't notice a large black cloud approaching until it is dumping buckets of water on us as we sprint back to the car. How much will they charge us for water stains on the car seats, I wonder?

We're still damp when we arrive in Peterborough at our accommodation for the night. We thought the place in Oxford was a little dodgy, it had nothing on this place! It seems I've neglected to read the town safety rating on Google which Jo informs me, after a search on her phone, is one of the least safe places to be in the whole of the UK! Drat, I've booked this place for three nights! The apartment itself is perfectly fine, a little kitchen, nice bathroom, all freshly refurbished, but walking out the door and down the cigarette-butt ridden stairwell and onto the street where suspect-looking characters are loitering is something else! We find a nearby Tesco, get some food and return unmolested. “We are not staying here for three nights,” says Jo. Right, that's a few hundred dollars down the drain, but better safe than sorry. We are just hoping our car is still there and undamaged in the morning. I get on line and make bookings in Ely and in Cambridge for the following two nights.