Off to Oxburgh

Decided to tick Oxburgh Hall off our list today. It’s another National Trust place, so of course we can get in free. It was supposed to be near King’s Lynn, but when we put the post code in our trusty GPS it turned out to be a lot close to where we’re staying than we expected. Took only about half an hour all up.
On the way there we stopped off in a couple of places, Hingham and Watton. Hingham is a fairly small town (almost a village) which has the claim to fame that Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors came from there. It also has a couple of other interesting features: the largest parish church in the area, and a shopkeeper who sells ex-army and navy stores gear, and Russian Christmas decorations. Okay….! How he manages to get rid of either I don’t know, since he certainly wouldn’t make much money out of the local people. Buses pass through fairly regularly and presumably he makes money out of the tourists. But what an odd combination. The shop was full of these decorations: hand painted balls of various sizes, and a few other items. That was in one side, while in the other were all the army and navy clothes and boots and so on. Outside he has a sign in Russian. Strange.
The church was certainly large, and reasonably interesting. Lots of stained-glass, a bust of Abe, a marvellous memorial in carved stone to a number of leading lights in the village from way back.
Next stop was Watton, a much large place - with op shops. Investigating those took us a while, and then we found a secondhand bookshop. That took longer. Celia got a couple of books on making hassocks, something she’s been quite keen to investigate since we came across all these ones in churches, and I found one of the two Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael books we’ve been trying to track down.
We had lunch in the car park and then drove on to Oxburgh, which, as I said, turned out to be closer than we expected. More on that in the next post.