Ipswich is a mid-sized town in Suffolk near the east coast
of England. It claims to be the oldest continuously settled town in Britain,
having been settled without a break since the Anglo-Saxons built on the land
sometime between the seventh and eighth centuries, and it has been home to many
famous and interesting figures.
It is also where Felicia was born.
When I told my flatmates that I was going to Ipswich with
Felicia for the weekend, they were slightly confused. “Why Ipswich?” I guess oldest-continuously-settled-British-town isn’t as
cool when you’re used to living in a country where every square inch of land has
several pounds of history buried beneath, but here are some more interesting
facts I found about Ipswich:
- Charles Dickens stayed there while he wrote much of The Pickwick Papers, making the building that used to be The Tavern hotel famous in chapter 22 of the book.
- The painter Thomas Gainsborough (The Blue Boy now at Huntington Library in California) also lived and worked in Ipswich.
- Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, was born in Ipswich.
- Ralph Fiennes (VOLDEMORT!) was born here.
- Cardinal Wolsey, King Henry VIII’s almoner who was executed for famously failing to secure Henry’s annulment from Catherine of Aragon, thus necessitating the split with the Roman Catholic Church, was born and raised here.
- The world’s first commercially marketed, powered lawnmower was built in Ipswich in 1902.
We set out one weekend in late November and after almost
missing our bus in central London, we arrived in the charming town and began a
bit of an unplanned adventure.
Felicia had wanted to find a hotel once we arrived instead
of booking ahead, which it turned out was similar to trying to walk around
Chino Hills to find a hotel: there aren’t very many and they aren’t very close
together. We found a Novotel after walking for a while, but the room was about
80 pounds a night, so we asked them where another hotel was and they gave us
directions to a Ramada Encore that they said should be cheaper.
Given the fact that I was helping navigate though, we of
course got lost and ended up walking well over a mile with our heavy backpacks
before finally finding it. The room was only about five pounds cheaper between the
two of us, but since it was so late at this point and we were tired and hungry,
we decided to stay.
We got going relatively early the next day, walking through
charming pedestrian streets that ranged from broad roads to narrow alleys and
taking in the shops, cafes and cobblestones as we admired the jumble of old
buildings. Some were made from weathered bricks; some from great white stones
and others were built in the old terraced, half-timbered style of English
architecture. We came through several arcades and out onto what looked to be
the main town square. There was a large Christmas tree in the center of the
square with lights draped down from the top and big official looking buildings
around it.
We took a side road towards several pretty church steeples
and got breakfast at a small café before retracing our steps to the bus station
and boarding a bus that would take us to the even smaller village of Eyke.
Eyke, the village where Felicia lived for the first couple
years of her life, has a population of around 100 and is 10 miles outside of
Ipswich between Woodbridge and Snape.
The village offers an old church, a pub that is only open a few nights a
week, one corner shop and a handful of houses. If you leave the few blocks that
make up the village, there are farms scattered across open fields in all
directions and the kind of beautiful English countryside where you could walk
for hours without meeting another person.
We were able to find Felicia’s old home quickly, right
across the street from the Church of All Saints. There was an old stone wall
holding back the graveyard above the street across from her old house, and we
hopped up to walk among the ancient graves. Most were so worn from weather and
moss that the words carved into them were no longer legible. The church,
originally founded in 1359, rose in the middle between skeletal elm trees and
looked slightly odd with no steeple or tower to guide people to it. It almost
looked more like an ancient, stone barn than a church.
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| The main street in Eyke. |
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| The same street, two blocks further down. |
We paid a visit to the corner shop so Felicia could ask if
the shop owner knew the addresses of several people that her sisters had told
her to look up. The lady in the shop was nice enough, but wasn’t overly
friendly, and gave us vague directions to the houses. After walking around the
few blocks that made up the town for half an hour and finding neither of the
two houses she had sent us after we returned, frozen to the bone and glad for
the warmth of the shop.
She was confused to see us again, but grudgingly gave us
vague directions to a third house, and this time we were in luck. We found the
house and the women we were looking for were home. They were nice, but a little
busy so we didn’t stay long.
We had been in Eyke for about an hour, but the bus wasn’t
going to return for another hour and a half to two hours, so we decided to walk
through the countryside.
It was freezing and the wind was cutting through our coats,
but the shop woman didn’t seem to welcome our company, the pub was shut and the
church was locked, so we took the only other semi sheltered option in town and
huddled in the red phone booth for a while before starting out.
Pulling on our inner strength and memories of warmer times,
we left the windless semi-warmth of the booth and began following the main road
out of town, taking side roads that looked appealing as we came to them. We
followed a gravel road past farmhouses and fields, lonely trees and shire ponies
in pastures, walking aimlessly until the trees had cleared enough to allow the
biting wind to gnaw at our faces again and we finally turned back to find
another alluring road. In the other direction we found White Woman’s Lane,
which seemed an ironically appropriate path to take.
After a while we returned to our phone booth and stood
inside for a while before once again braving the arctic temperatures beyond its
dusty windows. This time we went further past Felicia’s old home, passing
charming (warm) homes, tire swings tied to the large oak trees and berry bushes
growing wild on the sides of the street.
With the bus soon approaching, we returned to the bus
shelter, huddling as far back as we could get in an attempt to stay out of the
wind before the bus finally came and we boarded, our legs moving stiffly from
sitting idle for ten minutes in the cold cement shelter.
Other Photos
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| A building near our hotel. |
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| The adorable octopus on the building. |
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| "Think about it: You don't really know what you look like with your eyes closed." --Felicia. We do now. |
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| I was very excited to see that there was a town called Snape. |
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| If Eyke ever creates a tourism brochure, this should be on the cover. |
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| Me attempting to save my freezing ears. |
RLO
I love how orderly the British tend to be. For example, whenever possible, British people form an orderly queue, and wrath is rained down upon anyone who tries to cut the queue. Or, on the Tube, you stand on the right of the escalator and walk on the left. This isn't just a theoretical practice either like it is in the U.S.; everyone actually follows this rule. Being something of a rule follower myself, I very much appreciate the order.
Londonisms
Pot Noodle - Cup o' noodle
Stone - A common measurement of weight that approximately equals 14 pounds or 6.35 kilograms. (i.e. someone might say " I gained a stone over holiday.")
Stone - A seed in a piece of fruit. (i.e. "I always get a stone in my oranges.")
Hosepipes - Hose
Dear - Expensive (i.e. "Isn't TopShop really dear?")
Bleeding - freaking; a variation of the the British term bloody. (i.e. "These bleeding tourists always get in the way.")
Botch - Mess up (i.e. "Don't botch it")
Cock up - Mess up (i.e. "Don't cock it up")
