Details of the Summer Visits arranged for 2025. Click the images below to see larger versions.
Note: the Wingfield College visit is almost fully booked. Please check with Alison Pickup by phone (01728 685489) or email (below) before making any payment.
You need to book, and please download this form, and follow the instructions in it, including how to pay. Please return the completed form preferably by email to alisonpickup@btinternet.com.
Some events may be limited in the number of attendees, in which case priority in booking may be given to members (so if you’re not a member, why not join now).
The Food Museum
Stowmarket IP14 1DL
Friday 23rd May
Meet outside the museum entrance at 2:00pm
To get there by car: Use postcode IP14 1PW to Finborough Road, then turn into Iliffe Way. The museum car park, ‘Iliffe Way Carpark’ IP14 1SL is on the right.
The Food Museum is the UK’s only museum dedicated to food. Its mission is to connect people with where their food comes from and the impact of choices on the environment, society, health and wellbeing: past, present and future.
For our visit we will get a guided tour of the Abbot’s Hall and walled garden as well as the watermill which will be in operation. The Abbot’s Hall dates from 1709 and before that it was the site of a monastic grange linked to the Priory of St Osyth in Essex.
This mill with its house and cart lodge was relocated to the site in the 1970s. Inside it has an overshot wheel, with the water fed from above. This is unusual in East Anglia due to the flatness of the land. Once our tour is over you are free to explore the many and varied area of interest on the very large site (84 acres).
You will also receive free admission for the year with your ticket.
NB the Museum requires your details for this benefit. If you are unhappy with this let us know at the time of booking.
Linden House, Eye
IP23 7AG
Tuesday 24th June 2025
Meet outside the house at 2:30pm
To get there by car: In Eye with Barclays Bank ahead, turn left and travel 250 yards, leaving the Town Hall on the left. You are now in Lambseth Street. Linden House stands back slightly from the line of buildings on the right. White posts and chains and five pollarded lime trees stand in front of the house. There is some room for parking right outside.
Linden House is one of the most important buildings in Eye and not generally open to the public. Built around 1550 to look out over the marshes of the ‘island’ settlement by the River Dove, the farmhouse was turned around two centuries later, when prosperous Eye was second only in importance to Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds. With the plot restricted by neighbouring properties, adding an extension to the side was not an option, so the enterprising owners doubled the size of the place by building on the ‘back’. The brick skin over its timber frame has turned the house into a smart classical building, retaining a homely atmosphere in its simple interior layout We will receive a tour through the ground floor and first floors, which contain many portraits, family effects and varied, interesting items of history and of foreign travel, with a talk on the house and town.
Earlier inhabitants included Margaret and Mary Thompson, two truly remarkable women suffragettes, who become local magistrates when they retired with their four other spinster sisters, in 1925, to Linden House until 1952. It was also a scene for a Miss Marple thriller. As part of our visit, we will receive tea and scones.
Wingfield College and St. Andrew’s Church
IP21 5RA
Friday 4th July 2025
Meet outside the house at 10:30 am
To get there by car: From Stradbroke take the B1118 north towards Diss. Take the second right (after about a mile). It is signposted for Wingfield College. Take the second left down a narrow lane. The house is by the church.
We will receive a guided tour of the house and church with Edward Martin and possibly the castle (will require a further car journey).
Wingfield College is of the most extraordinary house and gardens in Suffolk, the grand Georgian façade of Wingfield College conceals a rare mediaeval survival: the remnants of a chantry college of priests, complete with a cloister walk and a Great Hall from 1362. It is part of the history of education in England and a reflection of the great wealth and power of mediaeval East Anglia. Now a private family home, not generally open to the public, it is associated with many important historical characters, including The Black Prince, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII and the de la Pole family.
The Foundation Charter for St Andrew’s dates from 1362. Sir John de Wingfield, a close associate of the Black Prince, had died the previous year and left money in his will for the replacement of the existing church with a larger building. Descendants of Sir John extended the building still further.
St Andrew’s contains three notable tombs: Sir John de Wingfield, Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk and his wife Katherine Stafford, John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk and his wife Elizabeth Plantagenet, sister to Edward IV and Richard III. Their son, John, Earl of Lincoln was named by Richard III as his heir.
The interior of St Andrew’s also contains a medieval church chest, the soundboard of a Tudor organ, and an 18thcentury shelter for a priest taking a funeral in the churchyard while it was raining.