Kirton

With another fine, warm February day forecast for today, we walked to the northwest of our house, using footpaths and country lanes and meeting no-one outside the built-up areas except a dog-walker, a couple of cyclists, and a runner.

Kirton is a dormitory village for Woodbridge, Ipswich and Felixstowe, with many new houses and, judging by the notices of protest in several gardens, the promise of more housing development in the latest local authority plans.

The only services we could find were an occasional bus service to Woodbridge and Felixstowe, a pub, a village shop which has, sadly, recently closed, a village hall and a church hall, and a beautiful little church which traces its vicars back to the 13th century. Every driveway had a car in it so the village's population is dependent on deliveries or driving to the shops.

We spent time wandering around the carefully-kept interior of the church and rescuing a tortoiseshell butterfly which had over-wintered in it but was now desperate to get out, and then went and sat in the graveyard.

A feature of some of the graves which I have not seen before is a smaller headstone placed in front of a larger, often with only a brief inscription, and usually obscuring the dedication on the main stone.

In this example, the big stone reads "In Memory of Thom...." with, in a different font above it, the word "Also", as if this had been added after the smaller stone was placed in front of it. The smaller stone reads "I   C", then "1811" then "T + C" then "1819". I wonder if the smaller stone commemorates a child, "TC", who died aged eight.