Bury St Edmunds

We booked our wee holiday near Bury St Edmunds for easy access to two places: (1) Girton College; (2) Sutton Hoo. Our visit to Girton yesterday was a great success. I wish that I could say the same about Sutton Hoo today. 

We had high hopes for Sutton Hoo knowing that the site has a relatively new visitor centre. On the car journey there we discussed the questions that we were bursting to ask of the guides. These drew on the 'homework' that we completed ahead of our visit. Our first disappointment was to be told that the burial mounds were closed to visitors due to 'high winds'. Admittedly it was a bit breezy, but hardly dangerous. The parts of the site that were accessible, including the exhibition hall and the house, didn't hold our attention for long. This was mainly because the information presented was rather basic and didn't add to our existing knowledge. The site as a whole looked a bit sorry for itself. A neglected set of planters that (supposedly) displayed plants used by the Anglo Saxons for purposes such as dyeing cloth and medicine (in fact full of weeds and dead foliage) summed up the whole experience for us. I would recommend to anyone interested in Sutton Hoo to learn about it from books, the Internet, podcasts, documentaries etc, and then go and see the artefacts at the British Museum.

The day was salvaged with a trip into Bury St Edmunds on the way back to our hotel. We enjoyed the beautiful Abbey Gardens and a walk through the cathedral (blipped). There was a beer festival taking place in the main hall of the cathedral. This must have been quite bizarre for the bewildered foreign tourists that we saw on a guided tour!

Exercise today: walking (9,588 steps).