The small village of Thorpeness was next, and we had read a little about it being a fantasy holiday village, and it sounded a little like Portmeiron. It was the dream of Stuart Ogilvie who bought the hamlet in 1910 and built holiday homes in mock Jacobean and Tudor styles, a country club with golf course and swimming pool and invited his friends and colleagues to spend their holidays here. The village is dominated by the Meare, a shallow boating lake which was designed with landings and inlets for children to explore, named after places in Peter Pan as J.M. Barrie who was a family friend. It is still popular today, but rowing looked too much like hard work, so we didn’t explore and find the Pirates’s Lair, Wendy’s House or the crocodile!
We had a wander and saw the Almshouses …
… and saw Ermintrude, who at 92 is the oldest bus in Britain in regular work, and runs between Aldeburgh and Thorpeness in the summer …
… and a variety of houses.
Nothing was allowed to spoil the fantasy, so Ogilvie replaced the ugly metal pump which drew water from the well with a relocated windmill ….
… and found a whimsical way to conceal the water tower, transforming it into The House in the Clouds, now available as an unusual holiday let as the village got mains water in 1963.
We walked back along the beach, yet another shingle beach, although this was beautiful golden sand when Ogilvie started his village in 1910. I guess this might be the case with many of the beaches along this stretch of coast as sand seems a little sparse these days, with Southwold beaches being the sandiest.
Thorpeness remained mostly in family ownership until 1972 when Ogilvie’s grandson died and much of the village was sold off to pay death duties.
I had been reading about Dunwich and realised that we hadn’t actually visited the village and beach the other day, so we stopped on the way back. Dunwich was once a thriving medieval port and capital of the kingdom of East Anglia and is another casualty of the coastal erosion and storms in Suffolk which have washed most of it away. We walked along the cliff path, keeping well away from the edge and saw the last remaining grave from the church …
… and the ruins of Greyfriars, once a monastery with a similar tale to Leiston, dissolution and conversion to a country house, but this was later demolished and it’s been left as a ruin.
There was far less breeze today so we stopped at the beach for a bit. I even thought I would swim, but I got in so far, spotted a couple of jellyfish and beat a hasty retreat, and resigned myself to playing in the sand and sitting in the sun!
With the sun still shining, it was Mojito time and Chris remains Uno champ then more deli treats and a little bulgar wheat salad made with our first runner beans of the year spotted in the greengrocer in town.
Off Travelling Together 