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Woolpit Day Meeting

May 2004
Report by Jonathan Abson

The first day meeting of the year was held in perfect late spring weather at Woolpit. The Woolpit Local History Society welcomed us and their Secretary, Elizabeth Cockayne, gave us an amusing and interesting history of the village as an introduction to the day.

Woolpit church Woolpit is lucky to have a Museum building with room for meetings, which would have made the perfect sheltered place for pack lunches on a wet day. Of course as a large dry room was available, the weather remained perfect for the whole day.

The church was interesting, the brickworks and the old walls with their different bricks and the steep sided deep pond that is the remains of one of the diggings were fascinating.

The timber framed houses in the village were sometimes as unobvious as they often are, but the unexpected highlight of the day was the preserved and safeguarded enclosed space of Lady’s Well.

Timber framed houses, Woolpit High Street Can you imagine seven acres of wood surrounded by wild flowers and completely protected from vehicles, accessible only on foot, but not more than a few minutes from the centre of the village? In the middle of the wood was a spring, the beginnings of the local stream

Beside the path was a pollarded tree, and what a tree and what pollards. No one knew when the tree was last pollarded, it must have been a very long time ago for there were several ‘tree diameter’ pollards growing from what had been a flattish crown at 20’ or so.

By comparison, Epping Forest is full of pollarded trees, but none anything like the scale and size of this one. Something truly remarkable towards the end of a very happy day