towers and gardens

I went to see another garden this morning to do a write-up for the magazine.  It turned out to belong to a charming and resourceful owner, and was a good garden, and that's all I'm going to say on the subject at the moment.  I didn't even try to start my piece this afternoon, having learned from past efforts that the best approach is to save it until the following morning, then sit down straight after breakfast and produce the first draft in one continuous run.

It was in a pretty village just outside Bury St Edmunds, and rather than risk the vagaries of the A14, I took the A134 past Sudbury to Bury.  The A134 is growing on me.  It is not an especially fast road, but goes through very pretty countryside, and while the initial grind through Colchester and past the north station is a drag, it's more direct than looping all the way up to the Copdock interchange at Ipswich.  About two-thirds of way between Sudbury and Bury it passes through the gloriously named village of Bradfield Combust.  I managed to get a glance in at the village sign, as I sailed through at a sedate thirty, and saw it incorporated flames into the design.  Something burned, evidently, or at least local legend had it that there was a fire of some sort.  I was curious enough when I got home to check on Wikipedia (what would we do without it), and while the precise nature of the conflagration is open to question, and whether it really involved the local hall, certainly the name has existed since the very early 1300s.

I reached the garden with oodles of time to spare, having allowed for traffic jams, diversions and simply getting lost, none of which happened.  The house I was bound for did not actually have a name sign, as is often the way with rural houses (ivy has grown over our sign and needs chopping back), and as today was not a Yellow Book open day, the comforting advice in the booklet that the garden would be signposted from the road did not hold.  Since I had plenty of time in hand, and didn't want to spook the owners by sitting outside their gate in my car like a stalker, I went on up the road to see what there was to see, and to check that there wasn't another house fitting the description even more exactly just a couple of hundred yards further on.

I'd made a note in my route plan that if I got to the church of Saint Nicholas then I'd gone too far.  I soon did get to the church, without passing any more likely looking houses at all, which rather confirmed that I'd found the right place first time.  To my delight, the church was open.  It is an absolute sweetie of a church, with a round tower sporting fine, plain Norman arches, and a remarkable absence of Victorian mucking about.  I've seen another round tower church relatively recently, at Lamarsh, but that was locked.  A notice in the porch said that there were around 180 round tower churches in the UK, mostly in East Anglia, and sure enough they have their own society. That, and a rumbling dispute about how many of the towers are really Saxon, or whether they are later, and why they were built round and not square in the first place.  The Round Tower Churches Society, patron HRH the Prince of Wales, looks a useful body, and I can think of worse projects than to set out to visit every one of the one hundred and eighty something round tower churches.