Son and Daughter in Law found an online voucher for free admission to a National Trust property for October and they hadn’t been to Sutton Hoo for many years and I’d not been since they built the viewing tower and refurbished the displays in the main building so we all went together. Including youngest granddaughter and middle grandson of course.
Sutton Hoo is all about a ship burial containing an important man from the Anglo-Saxon period and his treasures – thought to be King Rædwald – and hidden beneath a mound in the 7th Century, rediscovered properly in 1939 and made even more famous recently with the film The Dig (wiki info HERE).
This is what I wanted to see ………the relatively new viewing tower. 81 steps up to see the view over the burial mounds – sorry the sun was wrong for this photo.
Below are the remains of the burial mounds. Much flatter than they would have been originally. The one with the rope around is the main ship burial.
(The dozens of little metal huts in the distance are for outdoor pig production – very big area for this all along the light land of the Suffolk coast)
This sculpture of the skeleton ribs below shows the size of this boat, must have been hard work dragging it uphill from the river and then burying.
Below you can just see the river in the distance down the valley, across the other side is the town of Woodbridge.
