Aldeburgh

 

Continuing my short tour of Suffolk, after I visited Sutton Hoo I drove about 15 miles or so to the small gentrified seaside resort of Aldeburgh. Its name means the old defended place and was first recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086.

It has a long pebble beach with a scattering of fishing huts selling fresh fish.

Once a thriving fishing and ship building town it was so successful it received a Royal Charter in 1540.

The decline of the industry began in the mid 1600s when pirates took fishing boats and many others were lost in terrible storms. Poverty and sickness led to the downfall in the town's prosperity and by1800 the population had decreased to 800. 

Now there is just a very small local fishing fleet that sells its daily catch from the wooden huts.

It also has a lifeboat. There are two lifeboat huts.

This modern one houses the main lifeboat.

Although closed to the public, when I was there, I could still see the boat through the window.

It was great to listen to the brass band playing as I walked along the beach  'Oh I do like to be beside the seaside....'     No they didn't play that one - but I felt the urge to sing it anyway.

At the other end of the beach is this sculpture by Maggi Hambling, a local artist. The Scallop was designed to celebrate the life of the composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) who lived in Aldeburgh.

The monument is pierced through with a quote from Britten's opera 'Peter Grimes'.

Walking back to the car park I passed the Moot Hall which dates from about 1540. It used to house both small shops and a town jail on the ground floor and the council chamber on the upper floor. Nowadays it is home to the Aldeburgh Museum but the council chamber is still used by the council.

I enjoyed my short walk through Aldeburgh but there was somewhere else I wanted to visit before arriving at the hotel where I was staying for a couple of nights. I'll post about that next time.

 

Sutton Hoo

Last week I went away for a few days to the county of Suffolk in East Anglia. It's just a couple of hours from London by car but I haven't visited it that often and there are a few places I wanted to see. My first stopping place was Sutton Hoo. If any of you have seen the film 'The Dig' with Ralph Fiennes then you might be familiar with the name Sutton Hoo. Hoo derives from an Old  English word for a piece of land that sharply projects into a valley. The film is a true story about the 1930s land owner, Edith Pretty, who  hires an amateur archaeologist to investigate large mounds of earth on her property. What he discovered turned out to be one of the biggest finds in the history of England and beyond.

It was in one of these mounds that the ghost of a burial ship was found. After Brown had excavated some of the smaller mounds and discovered that they had been robbed by treasure seekers he didn't hold out much hope of finding anything. In May 1939 he decided to excavate one of the larger mounds and discovered five rivets in position in what turned out to be the extreme stern or prow of a ship.

Sutton Hoo's Great Ship Burial contained an impressive 27m long ship with space for 40 oarsmen. Signs of repair showed that the ship had made many journeys before it was hauled up from the river to its resting place here in the King Raedwald's grave. During the 14 centuries it remained hidden in the soil, the wood rotted leaving just the iron rivets behind and the trace of a ship. The ship weighed approximately ten tonnes and measured 27 metres. 

It had been carried up hill from the river and then buried with the late king and a collection of precious items befitting a king. It was in this part of East Anglia that the Anglo-Saxons interred their dead kings during the 6th and 7th centuries.

This sculpture is a full scale representation of the ship.

This view from the 17 metre tall viewing tower shows the River Deben in the distance where the ship would have been hauled out of the river and up the hillside. 

Once it became obvious that this was an important archaeological site, experts were called in from Cambridge University. In all there were 263 finds of gold, garnet, silver, bronze, enamel and so on. Some were as bright as if they had just been buried whilst others were broken and corroded. Due to the imminent outbreak of war it was a race against time to excavate as much as possible before they had to refill the excavated area and prepare for war. The finds were packed away in anything they could get their hands on such as boxes and tins from the local shops. Edith donated the find to the nation in the care of the British Museum.

This is a reconstruction of the King's Helmet. The helmet was a challenge to reconstruct as only the nose, eyebrows and helmet crest were in one piece. The rest of the helmet had been crushed into 100 pieces when the burial chamber had collapsed. The original pieces form part of the reconstruction in the British Museum where all the treasure from the find is held.

Other reconstructed pieces in the Sutton Hoo exhibition include this shield.

A shoulder clasp.

The warrior horseman found in another grave was buried with his horse's harness. It was made of gilded bronze which was decorated with faces and animals. The grave of the warrior was laid out next to one for his horse. 

This pendant was made from a 200 year old Roman gold coin depicting the Western Roman Emperor Honorius who ruled between 395 and 423AD.

An antler comb

This is one of ten silver bowls buried with the king.

It wasn't until the 1960s that further explorations of the area took place. Much of this investigative work led to further information about what had happened to the king's body as well as other bodies. Chemical analysis showed that they had decomposed because of the acidic make up of the soil. No more artefacts have been found but much more still needs to be excavated and researched. I now need to make a visit to the British Museum and have a look at the actual treasure found at Sutton Hoo.

Sharing with Our World Tuesday

Trapeze in the park

 

Walking through Kensington gardens I came across this trapeze school. Has anyone tried this?

It was fun to watch and maybe, just maybe, a few years ago I might have been tempted!

Crossness Pumping station

September is the time for Open House when the public have an opportunity to visit buildings which are normally not accessible. With the ongoing pandemic the format of Open House has had to change with bookings for most buildings necessary, allowing fewer people entry. Last weekend I was lucky enough to get a ticket to see Crossness Pumping station or 'The Cathedral in the Marshes'. Built in 1865 as part of  the Victorian London Sewerage system it is now a Grade 1 listed industrial, heritage site. Entering the site I was delighted to see this steam train which takes visitors to the engine house.

The first railway at Crossness was built to deliver materials across the marshes to the pumping station and was a standard gauge of four and a half feet. This one has been recently built by enthusiasts and volunteers just for passengers and is a two feet narrow gauge. I had no idea it was here so it was a very pleasant surprise.

Crossness sewage works was a masterpiece of Victorian engineering with elaborate ironwork.

From 1800 to 1850 London's population increased from 1.1 million to 2.7 million. Disease was rife with over 10,000 Londoners dying from Cholera in the 1853-54 epidemic. Four years later in the hot summer of 1858, the Great Stink, hung over the city. It was so bad that plans were made to evacuate the Houses of Parliament which run alongside the river Thames. The Metropolitan Board of Works gave the task of developing a new sewerage system to its chief engineer, Sir Joseph Bazalgette.  

Bazalgette devised a system of three massive intercepting sewers built parallel to the river. They were built underground and diverted the foul sewage water to great holding tanks here at Crossness and another pumping station at Abbey Mills in West Ham. The sewage would be held there and then pumped into the river on the ebbing tide.

Crossness pumping station was opened in 1865 looking magnificent with its colourful ironwork.

   

Metropolitan Board of Works.

  

The engine house contained four beam engines by James Watt & Co named Prince Consort, Victoria, Albert and Alexandra. This one is Victoria. The engines had 52 ton flywheels and 47 ton beams and are believed to be the largest rotative beam engines in the world.

An iron staircase led to the upper floor

I'm not a lover of heights and being able to see the ground through the floor always gives me hand sweats and a need to grip any available hand rail.

It was well worth it though to be able to look closely at the decorative ironwork from above.

 

         

In 1882, A Royal Commission was appointed to assess the state of  the Thames and sewage treatment. The commission's report recommended that untreated sewage should no longer be pumped out into the Thames. In future solid matter would be 'settled out' and disposed of  in the North Sea. Six sludge vessels were ordered. The first, the Bazalgette, was commissioned in June 1887. I bet he was thrilled to have a sludge vessel named after him. Dumping sewage in the sea continued for another hundred years until the1990s. By then, Thames Water developed two sludge powered generators at its largest sewage works in Crossness and Barking. Sewage sludge is dried into blocks called (for some unknown reason) cake. These cakes are burned to generate heat and drive a steam turbine which creates electricity. 

This is the modern sewage works just along the river from here, where the sewage is burnt to produce electricity.

Sharing with Our World Tuesday Tuesday's Treasures Through my Lens