Before heading home to London, we visited two properties near Kings Lynn. The first was Oxburgh Hall, a really photogenic moated manor house, one of the few which survived the post WWII years of death duties, and the desire to do away with the old and start afresh. Apparently two country houses of this calibre were being demolished each week during this era.
This makes houses like this even more special. The interiors are magnificent too, and surprisingly there are no problems with damp, despite the surrounding ,moat. All the lower bricks were triple fired, and totally impervious to water so there is no problem with the common British affliction of rising damp.
The next stop was just a mile or so up the road from Oxburgh, and also had a water theme. We found the Gooderstone Water Gardens on the web, and were intrigued with the history. A 70 year old retired farmer decided, in 1970, to take up his son's throw-away suggestion, and make a wet unproductive field into a water garden.
He spent the next 20 years moving large amounts of his “problem” field around, to make a series of ponds, rivers, bridges and walkways. Each are planted around with shrubs and flowers. I guess we liked the idea, that someone had achieved this project so recently, and wanted to see the result.
From here we set the SavNav to 'shortest' and enjoyed the variety of villages and countryside that came our way on the trip home.
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