Gainsborough's House

Let's leave the snow behind and re-visit the Summer

We are on our way home from our cottage and stop for coffee in Sudbury

where we visit the birthplace house of the great eighteenth-century painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)

The back of the house and garden

The 400 year old Black Mulberry Tree in the background

The house is now a museum

I still have lots of posts from last Summer - I'll get there eventually

Tea-time in Bury and...........!

We have left the Abbey where we planned to have afternoon tea in the Priory but we were too late, it was closing

We found an Illy tea room and coffee shop instead

Carrot Cake for Alan and Chocolate Eclair for me

Notice how quickly he demolishes it!

The quietness and peace of late afternoon

Refreshed and replenished I'll show you here just a few shots of the town as the rain begins

an entrance in part of the wall of the old abbey ruins

and...............!

on leaving my bedroom yesterday morning there was ice, frost and fog outside and rain inside!!

Roused Alan quickly because my hair was getting wet from water dripping through the ceiling

The over flow from the water tank had come adrift.

Alan says he must have knocked it when putting the Christmas decorations away. We of course knew nothing about it until the loft insulation became so saturated that the water had nowhere to go but through the ceiling.

God Bless Pete next door who came immediately and helped us with the mopping up

Heating on extra high now to help with drying out

  

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral, Suffolk

We make our way from the ruins on into the Cathedral via. some pretty gardens

There is such an interesting history to this cathedral that I thought it worth relating in detail

A great mixture of the old and the new

St. Edmund and The Abbey

The origins of the modern cathedral begin with the martyrdom of the Christian Kind Edmund by invading Vikings in AD 869. His body was taken to the town of Beodricsworth and a monastic community looked after his shrine. By 1020 a Benedictine Abbey had been founded by King Cnut, and this grew in importance. The Frenchman Abbot Baldwin, appointed abbott by King Edward the Confessor in 1065, began the building of the abbey church and devised plans for enlarging the town. In the 12th century Abbott Anseim continued the expansion begun by Baldwin of the now wealthy and influential abbey, and replaced the parish church of St. Denis with a new church of St. James. It is believed that the dedication was chosen because Anseim had failed to make an intended pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Compostela in Spain. Work to extend St. James' church westward began in 1503 with design work by master mason John Wastell who also designed King's College Chapel, Cambridge and Bell tower, Canterbury. Work proceeded slowly and St. James' was not completed until after the dissolution of the monasteries, the abbey in Bury St. Edmunds being closed and stripped of its treasures in 1539. 

St. Edmund's body disappeared; the ruins in the Abbey Gardens, Abbey Gate, the West Front and the Norman Tower are all that remain.

In 1914 a new diocese of St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich was created and St. James' was named as the cathedral church.

Enlargement began in earnest in the 1960's under the guidance of architect Stephen Dykes Bower. Different phases of building in the 20th and 21st centuries have created the cathedral you see today.

The Cloisters

A painting of the abbey from the air

The  Nave

Organ pipes

The Millennium tower

The Font with one of the many amazing stained glass windows all around the cathedral. This one depicts the last judgement with Christ in the centre

Looking through the font down the Nave

Well I think it is time for tea but we will keep that for the next post