A white weekend

We don’t often journey south, so this weekend’s trip almost felt like a visit to a foreign country… this wasn’t surprising as Essex is somewhat like a foreign country! Our first destination was Hadleigh where we joined my old friend Clare and her husband Ilir to celebrate the blessing of their marriage. After the blessing we retired to the delightful ground of ‘The Lawn’ where we soaked up the atmosphere and enjoyed a lovely three-course meal. The speeches following the meal were jovial and interesting and were followed by dancing. We particularly enjoyed the kosovan dancing…. which was very much like the greek dancing at Bill and Artemis’ wedding. We should have been well practiced… but we weren’t!

On Sunday Richard and I needed to fit in some training and so as we were in the south, Richard suggested that we visit the Seven Sisters because they were only 60 miles away. The miles were a little longer than we first anticipated, but the views of the chalk cliffs were amazing. We parked at Birling Gap and made our way along the beach beneath the towering white faces of the Seven Sisters. When we got to Cuckmere Haven we continued along the coast to get a fabulous view back over the cliffs.

We retraced our steps to the Cuckmere River and then followed it to Alfriston where we turned off towards Wilmington to see the Long Man of Wilmington, a 16th-18th century hill figure. With only an hour to go on our parking ticket we realised that we should get a move on and so we quickened our pace and headed back to Birling Gap. After another hour we arrived back and ate ice cream to recover some of the calories spent over the 17 mile run, before heading home.

We enjoyed our weekend in the ‘south’ and it was nice going somewhere new. This was particularly true because we got to see a new fake tree that we hadn’t seen before!