View allAll Photos Tagged Rewilded
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
I used to occasionally see roe deer in the local woodland but since the agricultural fields have been rewilded, they are a much more common sight this winter.
"100 x: The 2025 Edition","100x:2025","Image 6/100"
My photo choice for 25 January 2025
Stagecoach North East 24104, NK09 FLP, a MAN 18.240 with Alexander Dennis bodywork working route 317 which provides a link between Wallsend and Whitley Bay via much of the riverside between Wallsend and North Shields is running through the site of the former Smith's Docks on 8th May 2022. The bankside has been attractively rewilded with red poppies.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
I used to occasionally see roe deer in the local woodland but since the agricultural fields have been rewilded, they are a much more common sight this winter.
Week 4 for Club 241 photo-a-week challenge 2025
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
A very enjoyable morning taking pictures of this old farm that is in the process of being rewilded.
Worcestershire Wildlife Trust have many plans including planting trees, managing hedges traditional hay meadows and.making wildlife corridors.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
This is just the less than 2m wide grass verge on the edge of my ordinary suburban road. Because it hasn't been cut for a while, all sorts of interesting plants are appearing.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
A walk from Shipley Mill (where Jonathan Creek was filmed) into Knepp Estate. Did see four or five of the white storks, but four were way up high, and one was at a distance on a nest. They're doing really well on this rewilded estate.
I loved this gnarled old hedge line.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
Rescued, injured, abandoned, abused animals are brought to the centre for rehabilitation purposes. If they cannot be rewilded, they are given new homes in stunning massive enclosures kitted out to be precisely like their natural habitat. Some of these babies have lost legs, or wings, through flying into power cables or being run over by motor vehicles. Such beautiful majestic creatures, so much love for the work that is being done. If a bird of prey is successfully rehabilitates it is rewilded into a protected conservancy where its progress and safety can be monitored.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
Rescued, injured, abandoned, abused animals are brought to the centre for rehabilitation purposes. If they cannot be rewilded, they are given new homes in stunning massive enclosures kitted out to be precisely like their natural habitat. Some of these babies have lost legs, or wings, through flying into power cables or being run over by motor vehicles. Such beautiful majestic creatures, so much love for the work that is being done. If a bird of prey is successfully rehabilitates it is rewilded into a protected conservancy where its progress and safety can be monitored.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
Rescued, injured, abandoned, abused animals are brought to the centre for rehabilitation purposes. If they cannot be rewilded, they are given new homes in stunning massive enclosures kitted out to be precisely like their natural habitat. Some of these babies have lost legs, or wings, through flying into power cables or being run over by motor vehicles. Such beautiful majestic creatures, so much love for the work that is being done. If a bird of prey is successfully rehabilitates it is rewilded into a protected conservancy where its progress and safety can be monitored.
Three Small Blue butterflies - two were mating, while two others were flying around for several minutes apparently trying to join the fun!
The Small Blue is the UK's smallest butterfly and a real delight to find it locally to me. They rely on having kidney vetch flowers on which they lay their eggs. These fields have been rewilded with lots of wild flowers sown over the last couple of years, resulting in some unusual butterflies including Small Blue, Small Heath and Small Skipper (all the small ones!).
Week 33 for Club 241 photo-a-week project
and my photo choice for the month of August 2025.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
A beautiful patch of Monarda fistulosa along the rewilded stream of the Howard County Conservancy. Lamiaceae, tribe Mentheae. Howard Co, MD. Sykesville Quad.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
Five pictures from a lovely afternoon walk across my local fields which are being rewilded. Clockwise from top left: Viper's bugloss; Kidney vetch; Small blue butterfly; Small heath butterfly; Wild flower meadow dominated by ox-eye daisies, kidney vetch, birds-foot trefoil and clover.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
This project is part of the Ars Electronica Garden Gijón. Exploration of the potential of rewilding Europe as an operative territorial strategy with far reaching consequences for how we occupy space and engage as citizens.
For further information please visit:
ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/barcelona-garden-show/
Credit: Stefan Laxness
Rescued, injured, abandoned, abused animals are brought to the centre for rehabilitation purposes. If they cannot be rewilded, they are given new homes in stunning massive enclosures kitted out to be precisely like their natural habitat. Some of these babies have lost legs, or wings, through flying into power cables or being run over by motor vehicles. Such beautiful majestic creatures, so much love for the work that is being done. If a bird of prey is successfully rehabilitates it is rewilded into a protected conservancy where its progress and safety can be monitored.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
Rescued, injured, abandoned, abused animals are brought to the centre for rehabilitation purposes. If they cannot be rewilded, they are given new homes in stunning massive enclosures kitted out to be precisely like their natural habitat. Some of these babies have lost legs, or wings, through flying into power cables or being run over by motor vehicles. Such beautiful majestic creatures, so much love for the work that is being done. If a bird of prey is successfully rehabilitates it is rewilded into a protected conservancy where its progress and safety can be monitored.
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
Rescued, injured, abandoned, abused animals are brought to the centre for rehabilitation purposes. If they cannot be rewilded, they are given new homes in stunning massive enclosures kitted out to be precisely like their natural habitat. Some of these babies have lost legs, or wings, through flying into power cables or being run over by motor vehicles. Such beautiful majestic creatures, so much love for the work that is being done. If a bird of prey is successfully rehabilitates it is rewilded into a protected conservancy where its progress and safety can be monitored.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
When I were a wee lad, this little pond contained shoals of stunted rudd and the odd "rewilded" goldfish - all fair game for the young angler! I wonder what those mysterious depths hold now.
Rescued, injured, abandoned, abused animals are brought to the centre for rehabilitation purposes. If they cannot be rewilded, they are given new homes in stunning massive enclosures kitted out to be precisely like their natural habitat. Some of these babies have lost legs, or wings, through flying into power cables or being run over by motor vehicles. Such beautiful majestic creatures, so much love for the work that is being done. If a bird of prey is successfully rehabilitates it is rewilded into a protected conservancy where its progress and safety can be monitored.
Rescued, injured, abandoned, abused animals are brought to the centre for rehabilitation purposes. If they cannot be rewilded, they are given new homes in stunning massive enclosures kitted out to be precisely like their natural habitat. Some of these babies have lost legs, or wings, through flying into power cables or being run over by motor vehicles. Such beautiful majestic creatures, so much love for the work that is being done. If a bird of prey is successfully rehabilitates it is rewilded into a protected conservancy where its progress and safety can be monitored.
St Andrew, Tottington, Norfolk
There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs that point towards Tottington down the lanes from Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public. But if you are fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded itself. On the day I first visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly, their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a northern Irish village during the time of the conflict there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly, but that is all.
St Andrew is set at what would have been the top of the village, and the mound to the east of the church is the old vicarage. To the south was the village pub. The school that served the four villages of Tottington, Merton, Thompson and Sturston, paid for by Lord Walsingham who owned almost all the land in the parish, is nearby. St Andrew is the largest of the four churches now marooned in the Battle Training Area, and I think the best, with wide aisles and a rather mean clerestory, as if it is keeping the Breckland winds out. The clerestory came as part of the 1880s restoration, but the greater part of the church dates from the end of the 14th Century and the first half of the 15th Century, a solidly late medieval East Anglian church. As at Stanford nearby, the roof tiles have been replaced by blast-proof panels. You enter through the south porch into a squarish nave which is full of light, for there is no coloured glass here. The roof tiles are stored inside, and also here are the medieval benches, a fine set, their dusty ends rounded with animals. After the evacuation here, they were taken to nearby Rockland St Peter, where they were altered to fit the narrower nave there. They were returned 1990s and then since I took these photographs in 2004 the best of them have been sent on permanent loan to St Peter Hungate in the centre of Norwich.
As at Stanford, the chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was. This must have been a busy place in medieval times, because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares. High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the arcades.
Outside are more silent attendants, Leggates and Suttons, Boughens and Oldfields. And there are surprises. One, a headstone for a member of the famous Guinness family; their country estate was a few miles to the south of here at Elveden. Charlotte Ann Guinness of Portadown, Armagh died at the vicarage in 1924. She was 75 years old. And in the south-east corner of the churchyard, daffodils fly in the spring breeze above the last resting place of Lucilla Reeve. This remarkable woman lived at Bagmore Farm on the edge of the village, and continued to tear a living from the harsh Breckland soil even after the military takeover. She killed herself on Remembrance Day 1950, and was buried here. After the war, the Tottington war memorial was moved to neighbouring Thompson, on a road that led once to the now-lost village. There's a photograph of it at the bottom of this page.
Arthur Mee came here to Tottington in the 1930s when there were still people living here. In his flowery way, he recalled something that is now often forgotten. Tottington was the home village of Abbot Sampson, who made the Abbey of St Edmundsbury one of the most powerful in Europe, and is remembered still today as the symbol of the Greene King brewery. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship gives an interesting insight into this now lost village. Tottington parish was joined with that of Stanford, even though they were in different deaneries, and the joint incumbent was Frederick Mant who lived in the vicarage opposite Tottington church. At the time of the census there were three hundred and seventy people living in Tottington and a further one hundred and eighty living in Stanford. The morning service alternated between the two churches and on this particular Sunday it was held at Stanford church which is only a couple of miles off. Fifty-one people chose to attend the service, fewer than one in ten of the population, which is perhaps about right for this strongly non-conformist area.
However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard.
A neighbour recently posted on social media a shot he took of an impressive female wasp spider in his garden. So I went out to our "rewilded" patch to check the long grass to see if any were resident here. I didn't see a female, but I did see this (what I'm pretty sure is a) male. The male wasp spider may be smaller and less visually striking than the female, but it's still an interesting and welcome visitor, particularly given that they're normally only active for a couple of weeks in July.
We received a notification that the Boongala Native Gardens and Rainforest were open for a few weeks this spring and simply had to check them out. If you’re ever in the Sydney area in September, they are well worth a look. The site was once barren and weedy, after previously having been used as a farm and left to ruin, but the family transformed the area by clearing the weeds and planting innumerable native plants. Part of the property has been rewilded into rainforest, while the rest is a beautiful formal garden. We took the tour and many photos. This is their Brachychiton rupestris tree, aptly named the “Three Sisters Bottletree”. What a stunner! [Kenthurst, NSW]