England page 8-13
East of EnglandGentle landscapes straight from an 18th century oil painting. Villages of heartstopping lovely,half timbered cottages. Magnificent stately homes and awesome Gothic cathedrals. Traditional seaside resorts.Oceans of Fenland shimmering beneath huge open skies. Lakes and rivers teeming with wildlife. Cities brimming with history and culture.
The ancient kingdom of East Anglia, which was originally made up of the North Folk (Norfolk) and the South Folk (Suffolk). Today these counties are joined by Essex, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire,Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire.
Norwich,Norfolk's Cathedral city, its heart a medieval gem nestling beneath its dominating Norman castle. Cobbled streets of half-timbered antique and craft shops, fine Georgian town houses,
England's finest Norman Cathedral and dozens of flint-built churches whose bells have rung out across this delightful city for over 500 years.
Woodbridge is a dignified Georgian market town with a proud heritage of shipbuilding dating back to Elizabethan times.
In Roman times, Lincoln provided sheltered housing for retired legionaries and the city retains its long and fascinating past.
The honey-stoned, triple-towered Cathedral is one of the finest Gothic buildings in the country. Together with the Norman castle, it towers above an attractive jumble of timber-framed medieval houses.
Another of Lincolnshire’s famous towns Stamford, is known as the 'best stone town in England'. It’s a treat to the eye with its beautiful mix of medieval churches and Tudor, Georgian and Queen Anne houses, all built in the soft,honey-coloured stone of the area.
In Colchester, reputably Britain's oldest recorded town, stepped history back to Roman times and beyond. In the Castle Museum, housed in the largest Norman keep in Europe, you can not only see one of the finest Roman collections in the country.
St Albans is a real treasure house with its Roman remains, including a theatre and many more artefacts in the award-winning Verulamium Museum. Its Saxon Abbey,rebuilt by the Normans, has wonderful medieval wall paintings.
A rumpled patchwork quilt of subtle colours. Green of pastures on the Lincolnshire Wolds, the grey of mudflats dotted with rare birds, the sparkling blue of the Broads, a purple splash of lavender, gold of ripened wheat and the rich brown-black fenland earth - all lying beneath a huge dizzying ceiling of untainted blue
The finer details of this work of art are just as lovely: medieval country churches with round towers and thatched or timberroofs, white-sailed windmills, brick and flint cottages, half-timbered, moated farms.
On the coast the little fishing village of Skegness in Lincolnshire was transformed into a spacious seaside resort in Victorian times.
The Norfolk coast starts where the salt marshes of the Wash meet the striped cliffs of Hunstanton,
On the Suffolk coast, you'll find some of the most untouched and picturesque villages nestling on the cliff edges. Horse-drawn drays from the local brewery still deliver beer to the hotels and pubs
The unspoilt villages, with their thatched cottages and ironstone churches clustering round the village green, were the preaching grounds of the 17th-century author John Bunyan and the countryside around was inspiration for the settings of his Pilgrims Progress.
At beautiful Long Melford stands 16th-century Melford Hall -Elizabeth I stayed here with a retinue of 2,000 courtiers and servants. Nearby, is moated Kentwell Hall where authentic re-enactments of Tudor life take place each summer. Another magnificent Tudor great hall can be seen at Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire, while moated and fortified Oxburgh Hall is one of Norfolk`s finest medieval buildings and still treasures needlework by Mary Queen of Scots.
Blickling Hall is a breathtaking Jacobean country house with grounds landscaped in part by Capability Brown, who also worked on the magnificent deer park at Burghley House,
Stamford, one of the grandest Elizabethan houses in the country.
Woolsthorpe Manor, near Grantham, was the home of Isaac Newton
Ickworth House, a bizarre stately rotunda near Bury St Edmunds, reveals the grandiose self-indulgence of its 18th-century owner, as does the shell grotto at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire.
Most famous, perhaps, of the region's great houses is the royal residence at Sandringham, West Norfolk, where the Queen and her family still spend many weeks amid the estate's marvellous parks and gardens.
Legends abound the The Giants, Gog and Magog are said to be buried beneath hills near Cambridge.There are enough ghosts of headless horsemen and witches on broomstick to the beaver bishop on the sign at Babingley. He was appointed by a grateful St Felix after he'd been saved from a shipwreck by a family of beavers. The Pedlar of Swaffham is a happy rags to riches tale. And on the Suffolk coast, an Anglo Saxon treasure ship was unearthed. But no one has found King John's precious baggage train, lost in the shifting sands and sea of The Wash in the 13th century. They're still looking
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