The Lane to the Barker’s
Richard Negus walks down an unnamed lane in rural Suffolk for our series, There’s A Street in my Neighbourhood
We have two roads but no streets in my village. Streets are well lit and they bustle. We don’t bustle in rural Suffolk. Our shop and post office went west when agriculture modernised and mechanised, making most of the men redundant who had worked the land. The pub called time for good last year, the folk who now reside in the cottages where the farm workers once lived aren’t into beer and pickled eggs. No street lights spoil the night sky, nor are there pavements, cats eyes or white lines. We do have potholes though, a popular topic for neighbourly conversations once the weather and the state of your dog’s health have been exhausted. What we lack in streets we make up for with lanes. We have lots of lanes. A few have names. Windmill Hill Lane, that once led to a Windmill. We have Church Lane, that still leads to the Church. We have Moon Lane, that takes you to to a hippy commune.
Yet the lane that I love most has been nameless, certainly to my knowledge, for as long as lanes have been needed. So my family gave it one with unromantic practicality — ‘The Lane to The Barkers’. It’s an ancient track alright, wending a meandering way from my cottage in Finningham to the neighbouring village of Westhorpe — a place of zero shops and zero pubs, but it does boast a village hall. On The Lane To The Barkers you first pass through fecund farmland belonging to the Miller family, keeping Cromwell’s wood to your right. Oliver Cromwell camped here prior to his siege of Ed Sheeran’s castle on the hill in Framlingham. Depending on the crop rotation for the year, the lane is enveloped on all sides by either rippling wheat, cat-sick-coloured oil seed rape or beans, these being the standard crops grown in the clay of High Suffolk. Cross over a ditch and now you are on the Barker’s land.
On one side of the lane a field grows grass, the seed will be harvested and then sown on golf courses and football pitches; on the other, vast oaks fling shade. Their trunks are creased and wizened, like lines on a chain smoker’s face, it would take four large men holding hands to span their circumference. These are royal oaks, some at least 600 years old, boundary markers for three deer parks once owned by Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. Charles was a promiscuous rogue with an eye to greater things. Sent by Henry VIII to France to repatriate the King’s sister Mary following the death of her enfeebled husband Louis XII, he saw his chance. Brandon secretly wed Mary, enraging her brother, who fined the couple for their love match and exiled them to Westhorpe as further punishment.
The Lane to The Barkers is lined with hedgerows, yet more run at right angles, bisecting the fields. These ribbons of thorn are thick from bottom to top, many laid, staked and bound by own hands. The Barkers are people for whom farming is far more than just business, theirs is a love affair with the land, crops, margins, woods and hedgerows.
Through the boughs of an unruly orchard you spy Westhorpe Hall, the erstwhile love nest of Charles and Mary. The Hall is long gone, demolished in 1760, but the old moat remains ringing the construction that replaced it, as does a crumbling red brick bridge, casting Tudor shadows over the reedy duck filled water course. Charms of goldfinch flit from moat-side scrub, a yellowhammer in a hedge-top demands bread but no cheese. Hares play kiss chase in a field margin, soon to become thick with chalky yellow oxslip. A red kite overhead twitches his forked tail to maintain yaw. Walking the Lane to The Barkers is to simultaneously travel through history and bury yourself in modern farming. My footsteps tread where a Fendt tractor passed yesterday and Mary Tudor rode five hundred years before. I muse that she, just like me, would have delighted in the rippling chant of chaffinch in a bramble clump, serenading the early Spring as I turn right and make for home.
Richard Negus is a professional hedgelayer and conservationist. His book, Words from the Hedge will be published by Unbound in May 2025, and is currently available to pre-order