Friday 15 December - Downham Market

Weather: light cloud and dry

 

Last evening's entertainment - a Sherlock Holmes game. It got abandoned without conclusion at bedtime, so we still don't know whodunnit.

Another relatively early alarm this morning, as we needed to do our touristing early today, so as to get home in daylight (more on which at the end of this post). 

A few minutes before 9 we left the campsite and headed 10 miles down the road to Downham Market where, after a false start with the town car park being full, we found Bertie a slot at Tesco, giving us a maximum of 3 hours in the town. 

Whilst poking around the internet deciding whether Downham was worth a visit, I came across the Downham Market & District Heritage Society, which has published 6 leaflets on different themes of self-guided walking tours giving some of the history of the town. I made the random selection of the 'Gingerbread Town Trail' - the town being referred to as the gingerbread town in reference to the colour of the carstone out of which buildings were traditionally built. 

The Priory House - probably the oldest house in the town - but there's no evidence that there has ever been a priory (according to the leaflet and a plaque on the wall; a different information sign outside referred to the priory with more confidence)

Two chapels and the Sexton's House, in the old cemetery

A high point! We were standing on top of contour lines! Looking down on the flatness beyond the rooftops of the town.

The leaflet brought out attention to the oddity that this retaining was built using flint, whereas carstone is the traditional stone of this town. It wasn't the out-of-placeness of the flint that stood out to us, but the ugliness of the concrete into which the flint is set.

Market square, with town hall beyond. Today was market day, but the market is now held on the other side of the town hall.

With two sizeable supermarkets, I'd expected Downham to be quite a big town with a standard commercial High Street, but instead it mainly has independent shops, and is quite small. Having completed the heritage trail and feeling that we'd done a reasonable job of exploring the place (only as I type this have I remembered that I intended to go and take a look at the waterways), we adjourned for tea and brunch. 

Incidentally, the cafe visits of this trip have effectively been free. We have a rule about 'magic money' which is money that you don't expect to have (so a ten pound note found in a patch of heather on a hillside, or a refund that you didn't expect to receive), and thus can be spent frivolously without being considered an expenditure against the budget. I stretched the definition for this trip, but I'd had some cash sitting in my wallet for, quite literally, years. I almost never spend cash, so when someone gives me some (usually Ma-in-Law when I've bought something on her behalf), it doesn't get spent. This money had hung around for so long that I decided that it had become magic money and I opted to spend it on tea and cake/brunches.

And then we came home. Given how short the trip was, we would have made slightly more of it, and spent another couple of hours doing something, except that when we performed a check of Bertie's lights before we set out on Tuesday, we discovered that he had a tail light out. I didn't feel inclined to delay our departure, so my solution to this was that we would only drive in daylight and sort it out when we got home. The problem with this solution is that there aren't too many hours of daylight at this time of year!

In the repairs department I also need to confirm that the non-return valve on Bertie's relatively-new water pump (the one that pumps water out of Bertie's taps, not the one in his engine) is faulty and, assuming it's not a leak above the valve, sort out a return and replacement.