A tour into Suffok: Lavenham

, 19:44pm

I'd like to tell you something about a lovely village I visited last October with my husband. Its name is Lavenham.

Lavenham is a civil parish in Suffolk and is characterised by a lot of well-preserved medieval cottages. Also is very small and it's possible to visit it just in a couple of hours.

The first eye-catching building is the wonderful Church of St Peter and St Paul, with its 141 ft high tower (one of the biggest in Britain):

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We entered the church and we found inside it a fantastic town orchestra which was playing the "Eroica" symphony in a very good way. Actually, we were surprised to find so many good players in such a small town and we spent some time inside the church hearing them.

Also we had a look around the building (which is very big) and I remember there was an "out of time" graveyard on the back, with some gracious benches for sitting and... oh, well, I don't know exactly why anybody should sit in a cemetery, maybe in a sunny day, and read or think or wait. But apparently someone do it.

After that, we went for a tour of the city and we saw the famous twisted cottages!

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It' incredible how they wouldn't collapse.... and still people live in there! Every window showed a poster about the concert of the orchestra we had seen: the concert would have been that evening and I thought it would have been a success!

I am currently interested in the history of Tudors (it would be impossible to be not, because in Cambridge there are lots of remainders to them...) and I read that during the reign of Henry VIII, Lavenham was the scene of a strong resistance to Cardinal Wolsey's "Amicable grant", a tax being raised in England to pay for war with France. However, it was being done so without the consent of parliament.

In 1525, 10,000 men from Lavenham and the surrounding villages took part in a serious uprising which threatened to spread to the nearby counties of Essex and Cambridgeshire. However, the revolt was suppressed for the King by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk.

In any case, as you can see by my pictures, the twisted houses were amazing: it was also possible to visit one of them (and I strongly recommend it in case you'll visit Lavenham) and see the original medieval furniture! Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures inside.

However, walking in Lavenham was quite strange because it seemed to me that we were in a Tim Burton movie.... you know, like "The nightmare before Christmas", in which everything is twisted! Quite gothic and out of time.

I loved that!!!