Kentwell Hall in Long Melford, Suffolk and Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk are both moated, Tudor manor houses. Both have belonged to prominent Catholic families; the Cloptons at Kentwell and the Bedingfields at Oxburgh. The Cloptons took on Kentwell in 1377 but ran out of heirs in the middle of 17th century; the Bedingfields have lived at…
Tag: Norfolk
A Norfolk Barn Owl
Four in the morning and a barn owl hunts over the hay meadows for another hour before heading to the barns where there is surely a brood of young waiting to be fed; it is a fruitless hour of quartering and the occasional dive into the sward before reappearing empty handed. The grasses, mainly false…
Little owl on the old brick wall
The old farmyard buildings hold a pair of barn owls and little owls. The scolding blackbirds always let you know when they are about. The little owls are likely to nest somewhere in the abandoned livestock pens and the crumbling brick wall is a favourite perch. Of course, this photograph is as much about the…
A Snettisham Spring Tide
The high tide on the Wash at dusk on the 1st March before the ‘big spring’ the next morning occurs on a quiet, still evening. At Snettisham Beach, a mile north of the old gravel pits, the oystercatchers come down the water’s edge in a constant procession of small flocks that fly just over the…
Brancaster Beach, Norfolk
The last visit here was in a hideous midwinter gale a couple of years ago, but the weather in early March is crisp and clear with hardly a breath of wind. The tide is out and the gulls, oystercatchers and redshanks work the shallow pools and channels along this huge stretch of beach that sits…
The Wash in Winter
At Snettisham Beach, the dark mudflats riven with water channels stretch into the mists to the west. The myriad worms, crustacea and molluscs that live in the fine sands support over 400,000 wintering waterbirds including around 80,000 red knot; the estuary is also the roost site for around 30,000 wintering pink-footed geese that commute at…
Badley Moor in late May
The byway from Dumpling Green on the outskirts of Dereham leads due east between large. mundane rape fields that are just erupting a sulphur yellow and ancient oak woodland filled with dense hazel coppice. The rape is devoid of life bar a few stubborn poppies but the woodland holds a noisy shower of small birds;…
Thompson Water and Thompson Common Pingos
Thompson Water, constructed as a fishing lake in the middle of the 19th century by the local lord, is lost in woodland near the ancient Peddars Way. Soon after dawn, twists of mist drift up and across the flat water; mute swans upend to feed, ducks quack and dabble and little grebes dive. Calls from a…