Walking route around Lavenham in Suffolk named best in UK

The Times has named the walk around Lavenham and Balsdon Hall as one of the best in the country. 

The national newspaper said: "Spring was beginning to knock on winter’s door. Hazel catkins trembled in the wind, daffodil spears were pushing up along the hedge roots, and over the open fields the first skylarks of the year poured out their continuous, ecstatic song.

"But winter was not done yet. Grey-headed fieldfares, overwintering from Scandinavia, flocked round a stark concrete wartime pillbox, crowds of goldfinches twittered in the treetops, and the mud of the winter rains lay black and stodgy underfoot.

"Beyond the bare skeletons of beech and oak in ancient Lineage Wood we traversed fields of river-rolled pebbles to cross a tangle of old moats at Balsdon Hall farm.

"The yellow-faced 17th-century farmhouse lay tucked away behind trees, a remote setting among the fields. A characteristic rural Suffolk landscape, agricultural and unsmartened.

"Sugar beets lay heaped in roadside ramparts ten feet tall, and the great flint tower of Lavenham church rose across the waves of ploughed earth like a landlocked lighthouse."