Hidden East Anglia

Hidden East Anglia:

Landscape Legends of Norfolk & Suffolk

Fornham All Saints:

Mermaid in the well

Somewhere within the village there was once said to be a well, in which a mermaid lived who waited to grab and drown children who ventured too close and touched the water.

Source: http://www.paranormaldatabase.com/reports/mermaid.php

Fornham St. Genevieve:

Kingsbury Hill

A thickly-wooded eminence not far from the ruined church at Fornham is called Kingsbury Hill (TL834688), traditionally marking the graves of 'three British kings'. An inn at Fornham All Saints is named the Three Kings in honour of the legend.

The Clumps

Although they were actually prehistoric in origin, a number of mounds in a plantation called 'The Clumps' (now built over) were said to be where the dead from the 1173 Battle of Fornham were buried. This was a skirmish at the approaches to Sheepwash Bridge between Fornham All Saints and Fornham St. Genevieve, when the rebellious forces of Robert de Beaumount (Earl of Leicester) were routed by the army of Henry II under his Constable Humphrey de Bohun, and the Chief Justice Richard de Luci.

In 1840 the historian John Gage Rokewood wrote, in his note to the Bury monk Jocelin of Brakelond's 'Chronicle': "In felling, in 1826, an ancient pollard ash that stood upon a low mound of earth about 15 feet in diameter, near the church of Fornham St. Genevieve, a heap of skeletons, not less than 40, were discovered, in good preservation, piled in order, tier upon tier, with their faces upwards and their feet pointing to the centre. Several of the skulls exhibited evident marks of violence, as if they had been pierced with arrows, or cleft with a sword".¹

Thomas Carlyle followed this line and wrote that the bodies were "all radiating from a centre, faces upwards, feet inwards; a radiation not of Light, but of the Nether Darkness rather..."²

Sources:

1. John Gage Rokewood: 'Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda', p.86.
2. Thomas Carlyle: 'Past and Present' (1891 edition), p.39.

Fornham St. Martin:

The Hiring Stone

Near the yard of Hall Farm stands a smallish sarsen known as the Hiring Stone, at which, so it's said, for generations labourers were hired and wages paid. The then owner of the farm told me that even now he met his men on that spot every morning. He believed the rock to be "a marker on the Roman road that ran through here", but the nearest known Roman route runs by Hollow Farm, half a mile away. Dr. Ernest Rudge in the 1940's proclaimed this stone to be one of the markers on his supposed 'Puddingstone Trail' stretching all the way from Stonehenge to the north Norfolk coast.

Framlingham:

Secret tunnel

The Castle Inn stands at the entranceway to the grounds of Framlingham's 12th century castle, and naturally, a subterranean passage connecting the two is rumoured. See also Leiston.

Source: http://castleinnframlingham.co.uk/

Freckenham:

Secret tunnel

A tunnel is said to pass beneath the road, between the Hall on one side, and a Saxon fortified mound (TL668719) in Mount Meadow on the other. Some have said that the passage was big enough for a coach and horses to gallop through. The mound itself is often thought of as the remains of a small motte and bailey castle, but there's little evidence of this.

Sources:

Allan Jobson: 'Suffolk Villages' (Robert Hale, 1971) p.182.
'Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology', Vol.17, p.182.

Peter Tryon: 'The Castles of Suffolk' (Poppyland Publishing, 2004), p.39.

Friston:

The Spintow

A ghost known as White Hannah is said to sit at night in a pit called the 'Spintow', a spot where Roman remains were once found. She sits there crooning mournful songs and spinning 'tow', the broken part of flax or hemp.

Source: 'The East Anglian Magazine', Feb.1956, pp.236-7.