Wednesday.

At about nine thirty this morning Ann asked me if I had anything planned for today as she needed to do  some grocery shopping, preferably at Waitrose in Sudbury, and did I fancy a ride over that way? In fact I needed to take some snapshots for bloggery purposes; so with the proviso that we'd come back by a different route than usual, we set off. It was a dry but rather grey day with high cloud. As the above and below photos demonstrate,  many of the dyke sides and road verges were thick with primroses.

 In the above photo not only are there primroses beside the road, but, as you can see there is grass growing in the middle of the road, thus proving we are still in Suffolk.

The above tiny cottage has a very fine Tudor chimney leaning against it. We've seen this one before, and I think it's called something like Pepper Pot Cottage. It's rather a favourite of mine. Soon after that we took a quite deliberate wrong turn, and the rest of the cottages and small houses are all fresh ones to us.

The above one is called Priory Cottage and probably had connexions to a local Priory.

 The small farmhouse shown here probably has a late medieval timber framework under the thatch; speaking of which, the bird (a pheasant) perched on the right hand end of the roof is also made of thatch, and is probably the trademark of the thatcher.

The rather larger farmhouse in the last photo is pure John Constable (think 'the Hay Wain' and 'Willie Lott's Cottage', and you'll get the idea). It's probably much the same age as the previous cottage, or even possibly a little earlier, and, as you can see, there's part of a moat showing, which doesn't really fit the cottage, so there's  been a habitation on this site for a good many centuries.  A few miles after this we found ourselves running into Kersey, so knew we were only a few miles from home.  Exploration in our area  nearly always yields  pleasant  surprises.