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Today we toured from Clippesby via lovely country lanes to Thurne, Potter Heigham and Ludham, including a visit to St Benets Abbey, the only abbey in England to escape destruction during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.

Our first stop was the picturesque village of Thurne, where we viewed the river Thurne and windmill.

View of the river and the windmill at Thurne

Our next stop was Potter Heigham.

Swans at Potter Heigham

This was a day of extreme weather. We travelled to How Hill with the intention of taking an electric boat trip on the nature reserve, but were assailed by rain, hail, thunder and lightning! Unsurprisingly all boat trips were cancelled, so we travelled on to Ludham, where we consoled ourselves at the Alfresco tea room situated opposite St Catherine’s church.

The Alfresco Tea room at Ludham, and St Catherine’s church

We decided to seek out St Benet’s Abbey despite the weather. St Benet’s was a real gem.

Views of St Benets Abbey

St Benets Abbey

St Benets Abbey

St Benets Abbey

St Benets Abbey

Yacht on the Broads at St Benets Abbey and more abbey views

We then returned home to Clippesby.

Are these straw bales, modern art or swiss rolls?

Finally the sun lit up the treetops at Clippesby after a very rainy day.

Sunlit treetops at Clippesby

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We arrived at Clippesby Hall at 13:00, and found it to be a first rate camp site that merited all the positive reviews we had read. Our pitch was adjacent to a wooded area with mature pine trees.

Reception at Clippesby Hall and the woods adjacent to our pitch

Views of our pitch before and after setting up

After pitching camp we paid a quick visit to the supermarket at the local village, Acle. We returned to eat, and then sat outside to look up at the stars and listen to the wind in the trees until we lost all track of time.

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We are leaving tomorrow for a one week trip to the Norfolk Broads.

Our plans this year have changed somewhat – we were fairly well advanced in planning a tour of Denmark, but finally decided that with my work and training comittments and the credit crunch generally, it would be better to save this for another year and do a shorter UK trip this year.

This time we are camping at a single site for the whole week, at Clippesby, in the heart of the Broads. This is an excellent base from which to explore, and we intend to tour different areas of the broads by tandem. As we do not have to follow a strict itinerary in order to reach the next bed for the night this time, our emphasis will be on relaxing and enjoying the scenery rather than covering large distances.

As before we intend to post photos and details of each trip. 3G coverage is poor in most of the areas we are touring but we do have WiFi available at the camp site, and may also take advantage of available WiFi whilst touring. You are welcome to post comments or just say hi in response to a post at any time. You can also subscribe to receive email notifications of any new posts we make as we travel around. Instructions for doing this may be found here.

We found the following sites very useful when planning :-

The Broads By Bike – Contains a selection of short and medium length cycle routes around the broads. A number of them overlap, and so it is easy to combine a couple of shorter routes into a longer one, or add parts of different routes together. All the routes can be downloaded as PDFs.

The Wherryman’s Way

The Broads Authority Cycling Information

Visit Norwich – cycling around the Norfolk Broads

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