A winters walk from Felbrigg

As we were lucky enough to have a couple of weeks off over the festive period, we were able to enjoy lots of country walks.  Since going back to work at the beginning of January, we have had to wait for Sundays to enjoy this activity.  A couple of weeks ago we decided to walk from Felbrigg Hall, an historic house now owned by The National Trust.  This Hall is set in beautiful parkland and has a lovely wood, appropriately named the Great Wood.  The weather was chilly but bright with blue skies and we set off in good spirits.

Tillie & Raven enjoyed romping through the wood, intrigued and excited by all the wondrous smells and occasionally being surprised by grey squirrels suddenly leaping up a nearby tree. 

This tree is huge and to put it into scale I made Raven stand in front of it.  I think it was a Sweet Chestnut.  I love the bark pattern on it.

We walked on and out of the Halls grounds and headed field by field closer to the coast.  Some of the walk was on the Weavers Way and some on the Norfolk Coastal path, but mostly they are circular walks worked out by Nigel from the Ordnance Survey maps, taking into account, not too much road walking and trying not to cross cow fields – I love cows but hate walking in the same fields as them and more often or not there normally is a bull in the field!  I will walk miles in a detour to avoid this!

Our main stop was of course for lunch.  We stopped in another wood called Roman Camp which has a few seats strategically placed to view the sea in the distance and is supposedly the highest point in Norfolk – This not being very high at all as Norfolk is mainly flat.  We always have to share our lunch but we never get offered any of the dogs in exchange – Funny that!

We always take water for the dogs with us, but nothing beats a refreshing drink from a cool stream or best yet, a dirty puddle.

After our lunch we packed up and plodded on towards Cromer.  We arrived at the outskirts of this lovely old fashioned seaside resort, first passing the old town cemetery, which we looked around.  There were several headstones with nautical themes as many of the old sea going folk of the town, fisherman and life boatman are buried here.  We also noticed some lovely headstones with entwined hands, which we see a lot in various churchyards we pass on our strolls around the countryside.

We walked across town and then slowly made our way out again passing Cromer Hall (featured in a previous post) and then back across several fields.  The fields around this area are full of flint and lots of the houses have flint incorporated into their structure.  I wanted some big stones or bricks to use in some door stops I was making, so decided to pick some up.  They were actually brick size and weighed a ton in my back pack but luckily we only had another couple of miles to go.

By the time we got back to the car, we were all tired and the dogs clambered into the back of the car and crashed out.  I checked our mileage on my phone and we had done a total of just over 12 miles.

That was the last of the sweet and fattening take away picnic lunches for me now as I am now on the slimming wagon.  The last walk we did, I had a pasta salad and fruit – healthy but not as tasty as a Byfords delicious mince pie.  Also this last weekend we couldn’t go on our rambles as Tillie is walking wounded as she has cut one of her front pads and until this heals she can’t go far.