Newly-hatched mallard chicks

Mallard ducklings

A nestful of newly hatched mallard ducklings at Flatford Wildlife Garden.  Aren’t they sweet?

When I say newly hatched, I mean it. The mother duck was sitting on a nestful of eggs the night before, and when the volunteers came in next morning to open up, the nest was full of ducklings. Ten of them.

Before the garden opened to the public the same morning, the mother duck had chivvied her babies out of the nest and trotted them off to the river. With a bit of help from one of the volunteers who made her a temporary tunnel under the fence to lead the ducklings through.

(Mother ducks never seem to realise that although they can fly over fences and walls their babies can’t, and that picking a nest site in an enclosed area might not be the most inspired choice. Like the duck some years ago who decided to nest in the enclosed central courtyard of a prestigious office complex, so when the eggs hatched the caretaker had to carry the ducklings through the shiny glass atrium in a bucket with the mother duck quacking anxiously alongside. Fortunately the ‘aaah!’ factor of fluffy ducklings means human help is frequently on hand.)

These ducklings are now probably swimming about on the River Stour somewhere in Dedham Vale, delighting the visitors.

Flatford Wildlife Garden also has several nest boxes occupied by blue-tits and great-tits. Some of the nest boxes are fitted with cameras connected to TV screens in the visitor centre, so you can watch the chicks and the parent birds feeding them, without disturbing them.

Update (30 April): one set of great-tit eggs have hatched, so you can watch the chicks on screen, and the blue-tits are expected to hatch within a day or two.

Flatford Wildlife Garden is open every day from April to October, 10.30 am to 4.30 pm, free entry. Details on the website here. 

Sun Court, Hadleigh

Sun Court, Hadleigh

Hadleigh is a small market town in south Suffolk, in eastern England.

Map link: Hadleigh

Like many towns in the area, Hadleigh prospered from the trade in wool and cloth during the Middle Ages.  The streets in the town centre still feature many handsome timber-framed houses built by successful medieval merchants.

The East Anglian medieval wool trade forms the background to The Town House by Norah Lofts (reviewed here earlier).  The inspiration for the house built in the 15th century by the central character, the peasant-turned-wool-merchant Martin Reed, may have been one of the houses in the centre of Hadleigh, Sun Court.

According to the Hadleigh town website, Norah Lofts saw Sun Court when she was house-hunting in Suffolk.  The house had been built centuries ago for a wool merchant. It still has a large door onto the street, big enough for a laden pack pony to enter, with a smaller door inset for people to use.

Close-up of the main door at Sun Court, showing the smaller inset door

You may wonder why even the most dedicated merchant would want to let his pack ponies into his house (!).  In The Town House, Martin Reed’s house was originally much smaller and on only one side of the passage.  He later built a solar for his bewitching wife Magda to dance in (Martin’s solar was also, apparently, inspired by one of the rooms in Sun Court), and left a space between the new solar and the original house so that the pack ponies could still get from the street to the yard behind the house.  Later, Martin roofed over this space to create a covered passage from the street entrance to his yard and built rooms above it.  So the packhorses now trotted through Martin’s house to get from the street to the yard.  Subsequent owners remodelled the house and changed its use over the succeeding centuries, but the central passage – and its packhorse-sized door – was such a key part of the structure that it always remained. (Whether this reflects the real history of Sun Court or whether it is purely fiction, I have no idea – but houses do evolve in this sort of haphazard fashion, so it seems entirely plausible).

Orc Farm

You thought Orcs were a figment of Tolkien's imagination? Think again...




























Seen near Thorington Street (map here), on the Suffolk-Essex border.

East Bergholt Church

East Bergholt is famous as the birthplace of John Constable and the location for some of his most celebrated paintings. (Can there be anyone in the world who hasn't encountered Flatford Mill, even if only on a chocolate box?). It still looks a little like that today, with the addition of a popular tea room and a large population of very well-fed ducks.

East Bergholt stands on the high ground (44 metres above sea-level! In East Anglia that counts as Alpine) above the north bank of the River Stour. (Map link here)

I have a particular liking for East Bergholt church, and not only because it marks the end of the climb up from Fen Bridge (which is noticeably uphill, especially on a hot day). Here it is:
















If you think it looks a bit, um, unfinished, well spotted. Yes, it was supposed to have a tower, but the money dried up after the Reformation.

Which means East Bergholt, uniquely in England as far as I know, has managed to acquire a ring of bells without having a bell tower to put them in. Normally an English parish church will have half a dozen or so bells hung high in the tower, to be rung for Sunday service, weddings, civic alarm and high days and holy days in general. If you've read Dorothy L Sayers' The Nine Tailors, you get the picture. But at towerless East Bergholt, the bells are housed in a bell cage in the churchyard:


















Peering in, you can see the bells, a handsome ring of five:





















The bell cage was built in the 1530s as a temporary solution until the money for a tower could be raised. In the way of temporary solutions, it became permanent.

Spring flowers

Celandines. I've always thought of celandines as one of the candidates for Tolkien's elanor, the "sun-star" (the little yellow flowers growing in Lothlorien).














Pussy willow. So called because the smooth grey fur is supposed to resemble a cat's fur.











Violets















A colourful flowerbed












Primroses.

Suffolk spring

Snowdrops forming a carpet of blossom















A sculptural tree stump




















Catkins in the sunshine.












A handsome (if rather out of focus - sorry about that) garden visitor. This smart-looking male pheasant, along with a friend, has taken to coming to our garden this winter. Not only is there food around, I think the birds are bright enough to work out that they're comparatively safe in a garden where they're only likely to be shot with a camera.