Bramfield – Ancient Farms & Quiet Countryside

This is a quiet circuit, very easy, and good for walking and talking – if you have a companion who likes to talk – or just enjoy it on your own!

5 miles; 2.25 hours

The Crinkle Crankle Wall in Bramfield

The walk starts in Bramfield, an interesting small village just outside Halesworth. We parked in a layby opposite the Church, alongside a Suffolk ‘speciality’, a Crinkle Crankle Wall. To follow the walk please use OS Explorer Map 231, 1:25 000; the extract below shows the route and the arrows mark the photograph sites. This circular walk can be done in either direction, and as a circle, or a figure-of-eight. (We walked a circle.)

OS Explorer Map 231 (click on map to enlarge)

According to Wikipedia Crinkle Crankle walls originated with Dutch engineers who called them ‘slange muur’ – ‘snake walls’. The wall on the Walpole Road surrounds Bramfield Hall, and the design apparently gives strength and stability to a single-brick wall, as well as protection to plants, so it was also used to surround kitchen gardens. There are at least 50 examples of Crinkle Crankle walls in Suffolk – just ‘Google’!

A gateway into the estate?

Set off in the direction of Walpole and on the right look at The Grange, a Grade II listed building.

The Grange outside Bramfield

A little further on, just over the railway bridge, a fingerpost on the left leads across the fields behind Bramfield House, now a boarding school, and into the quiet Suffolk countryside.

Wheat in high summer

Woods behind Bramfield House School

Kingstall Meadow & Kingstall Woods

In the hedgerow

Ready for harvest, Earlsway Farm

Earlsway Farm (information here) is an odd name, suggesting a road, and June Brereton alludes to this possibility.

Earlsway Farm through the trees

Harvest time on a hot summer’s day

North Green Farm

Pevsner talks of ‘..good 16C plasterwork inside..’ North Green Farm, and this is perhaps a source of further information for research, otherwise there is no real information about the farm on the internet.

And just beyond Bulls Field…

Broad path, and ‘set aside’ verge for wild flowers

Bunkers Hill Farm

According to one of the many helpful signs found during walk ‘..Bunkers Hill Farm takes its name from the battle of Bunker Hill, a British victory in the American War of Independence in 1775, and it is likely that the farmhouse was built at the same time..’. But why link a remote Suffolk farm with a battle in Boston, on the east coast of America? And a battle which was appears to have been particularly gruesome.