I took a day off from the garden yesterday, and we went to Norfolk, to visit the market town of Wymondham (pronounced Windam) just south of Norwich. As we sat on Manningtree station the Norwich train became first seven and then nine minutes late. A member of staff walking by remarked that it was lovely to be sitting out in the sunshine. I thought that it was, and that it would have been even lovelier to have been travelling through the Suffolk countryside, but it seemed churlish to say so. We made the connection at Norwich with a couple of minutes to spare, so that was fine.
Wymondham is a pleasant town. After picking our way round the building site outside the station and across a fairly busy main road it was a very short walk into the town centre, where we found ourselves looking at the early seventeenth century Market Cross. Although called the Market Cross it is actually a hexagonal timber framed building on legs, what would be the ground floor being open sided. The upstairs houses the tourist information office, but that doesn't open on Wednesdays in March, and the lower storey was not accessible due to building works. Still, it is a handsome structure. It replaced the previous market cross which burned down in the great fire of Wymondham in 1615, caused by arson.
Then we went to look at Wymondham Abbey. The majority of the abbey was reduced to ruins after the Reformation, and only a few bits of stonework are still visible above ground, but the nave and aisles remain intact, between two towers, one ruined at the top. This is still in use as the parish church. The interior is massive, austere and beautiful, with great solid Norman arches stacked two high along the nave, and a later third row of arches above. The stone for the interior was shipped in from Normandy. The roof is fifteenth century and very lovely, with carved angels at the beam ends. The roof of the north aisle dates from the same period, though without the angels, and as I was getting a crick in my neck peering up at ceilings I lay down on the floor of the aisle to look at it properly. Nobody objected. The abbey is used for concerts as well as religious services, and I noticed with some regret that the choir of Kings College are due to perform Durufle's requiem there this coming Saturday. I should think that would be quite something.
We had a drink in The Green Dragon just around the corner from the abbey, which has magnificant beams and good beer, and lunch in the station cafe. This is famous among railway fans for its railway memorabilia. Afterwards I felt full of chicken, ham and leek pie, but in a good way. The station building is rather fine, a Gothick frolic in knapped flint and diagonal brickwork patterns, and the windows in proportion.
The Heritage Museum is housed in what was the prison. The chaps on the desk (I presume volunteers) were very keen that we should start with the dungeons, and as the first dungeon contained a strange collection of pre-war irons, electric heaters and vacuum cleaners we were a little bewildered, but the second dungeon had an audio presentation of somebody being incarcerated for theft and we began to get the picture. The ground floor displays had the sort of local history I'd hoped to find, so I discovered that Wymondham at one point was the brush making capital of Norfolk, but that the two brush factories, once employing over six hundred people, had both shut down and the sites redeveloped for housing. Apart from that there were the usual East Anglian rural industries, a bit of weaving, brewing, agriculture and the rest. Lotus cars are based quite close to Wymondham and there were some pictures of those, plus the usual fossils and fragments of pottery. I don't think the museum can be desperately well funded, and most of the displays consist of bits of text and photos painstakingly stuck onto boards rather than big glossy printed panels. It's quite engaging and you learn quite a lot, but it isn't quirky enough to make it into my Museum of Museums.
In the mid sixteenth century a local man, Robert Kett, led an unsuccessful peasants' rebellion. This sounded rather depressingly similar to modern rebellions, starting as a peaceful protest and ending in slaughter, via the use of captured nobles as human shields. Robert Kett was hanged at the time, and 450 years later has a school in Wymondham named after him.
We had half an hour to spare at Norwich, so went through the barriers and looked at the outside of the station, which is in honey coloured stone in a sort of Low Countries baroque meets art nouveau style. Then we came home, and remembered to get off at Manningtree and not Colchester.
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