Day 8: Walsingham, Burnham Thorp, Hunstanton, Heacham, and Kings Lynn

A wonderful and surprising county is Norfolk. In the space of just two miles you find a car boot fair and an ancient unmarked house of great beauty.

Driving through villages called Pudding Norton and Little Snoring, and its brother Great Snoring - you couldn't make it up - I arrived at the pilgrimage site of Walsingham.

I am spiritual but not a 'church' goer so feared I would be visiting a religious theme park.

Walsingham village was quiet on Sunday morning at 10 am - everyone still in bed, at the car boot fair or in church.

Walsingham does have shrine shops and it does have lots of churches including Russian orthodox.

For people like me, the visitor centre was educational, with a well made video explanation.

The original holy house and church holy house was desecrated by our old friend Henry VIII who destroyed so many religious houses up and down the country.

The new buildings are very twentieth century, and very beautiful.

People come from all over the world on pilgrimage to visit. I was fortunate to come here on a Sunday as there were two sung services going on, and the scent of incense which greatly added to my experience. I was surprised how the energy of the shrine affected me.

 

Onwards towards Kings Lynn, through fields of rape, grain and some pink flowers that I can't place. There is considerable ploughing expertise in these parts too.

I don't know about England's green and pleasant land - I am astonished at just how much of our countryside in Sussex, Kent, Thanet, Essex. Suffolk and Norfolk are bright acid yellow. Are we now producing enough rape seed oil for the whole of Europe?

Burnham Thorp was s small quiet village whose claim to fame is that it is Admiral Horatio Nelsons birthplace. There were signs to his church and a glass studio, but no sign pointing to his place of birth, unless it was the Lord Nelson pub.

At Hunstanton I found Le Strange Old Barns antique, art and craft centre.

 Well worth a visit.

 

Gary was one of the five potters exhibiting when I paid a visit. They are in the process of redesigning their website.

The locals suggested I stop at Norfolk Lavender at Heacham as it was on route. Gloria, my car and I minced in behind a stream of vintage cars only to be told as a ford of 2004 she did not qualify!!

Not very impressed with the Lavender centre. The lavender fields are at Sandringham several miles away, and this turned out to be a kind of tourist trap with very little of any relevance to the growth or distilling of lavender. 

They had some kind of extraction machinery, but it was idle and no one was there to talk about it.

I had the meanest portion of ice cream for £2.20 that I have ever had.

Onwards to take photos of Castle Rising in honour of my daughter Morgan who makes a habit of visiting castles. Check out more on her blog with details of her castle challenge.

On to my my last stop today at Kings Lynn, a very nice historic town.

 

 

Then I left Norfolk behind and drove onto the wide flat landscape of England's larder - Lincolnshire.