Autumn Colours in Ipswich parks

Today's aim was `Autumn Colours` and a visit to Christchurch Park was our first port of call.  We were blessed with some sunshine, which we had feared would not arrive. So we managed to take a few images, which hopefully tell the story of the Autumn scene.

As you enter the park, one of the first areas you come across is the large pond, and this is where these first three images were taken - complete with Armistice Day wreaths around the perimeter fence. The small high level cloud adding to the image I felt.

Then a couple taken elsewhere around the park.

Individual leaves looking beautiful in the morning light. With the image below taken as we exited one of the pathways, giving a tunnel effect.

These next few images were taken in Holywell Park, another of the beautiful Ipswich parks.

Holywell park also has a pond and it was covered in algae in which this Coot sat! 

Another wider image of the pond.

Then, just to compare the pond in other years, an image I took two years ago of roughly the same position. This time - real water!

So, a lovely few hours out amidst the autumn colours. Enough to lift anyone's spirits, I would have thought.

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Armistice with Ipswich schools - Christchurch Park

Yesterday was the day of national observance of Armistice Day. This is when we, and people around the world, take part in a two-minute silence to remember those who gave their life for their country.

This year marks the 106th anniversary of the end of World War I. On the 11 November 1918, fighting was suspended on the Western Front, so Germany and the Allies could reach a peace agreement, and the guns fell silent at 11am.

It's known as Armistice Day and that's why the period of silence takes place each year at 11 o'clock, on the 11th day of the 11th month.

We had gone to visit Christchurch Park to see the Autumn colours, but had not realised that groups from local schools were gathering to celebrate Armistice Day at the local War Memorial.

This is my record of the poignant ceremony

The officials and the groups of young people start to gather around.

The ceremony gets under way.

The lowering of the flags - a tradition which has come to symbolize mourning, respect, and tribute.

The deputy Mayor lays a wreath

The young people start to lay their wreaths

The Revd Sarah Geileskey, Priest in Charge of St Margaret`s Church, addresses the congregation

The young people start to lay their tokens, made earlier at school.

Albeit we came across the ceremony by accident, it was a privilege to take part, although at a distance. 

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Cardinal Wolsey's Angels come to Ipswich

Thomas Wolsey was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, around 1475. His father, who is thought to have been a butcher, provided a good education and he went on to Magdalen College, Oxford. Wolsey was ordained in around 1498. He became chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury and later chaplain to Henry VII, who employed him on diplomatic missions.

Wolsey was a cardinal and statesman, Henry VIII's lord chancellor and one of the last churchmen to play a dominant role in English political life.

Wolsey made a name for himself as an efficient administrator, both for the Crown and the church. When Henry VIII became king in 1509, Wolsey's rapid rise began. In 1514, he was created archbishop of York and a year later the pope made him a cardinal. Soon afterwards the king appointed him lord chancellor. Wolsey used his great wealth to indulge his passion for building - at his London home, York Place in Whitehall, and at Hampton Court, 20 miles south west of London. He also founded Cardinal College at Oxford (later King's College, and now Christ Church), but his haughtiness and grand style of living made him increasingly unpopular.

In 1524, he commissioned the Florentine sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano to create four bronze angels for his magnificent Renaissance tomb, but as we know, fate intervened and Wolsey fell from favour. When Wolsey died in 1530, his possessions were appropriated by Henry for his own use, angels and unfinished tomb included. 

Henry didn't live to see the tomb finished, though he outlived Wolsey by 17 years. Construction was halted despite Benedetto establishing a team of craftsmen in Westminster, and the plans of Henry's three children to complete the memorial posthumously went unrealised. 

After Henry's death, details of whether the angels remained with the tomb become scant. Elizabeth I moved much of the tomb to Windsor in 1565, where it stayed for over 80 years, with some parts sold off during the civil war to help finance the Royalist cause. After the civil war, the only element of the tomb known to have survived was a black stone chest, finally put to use as the centrepiece of Horatio Nelson's tomb at St Paul's Cathedral. 

As for Wolsey's angels, their location, if they had survived at all, was unknown. In 1994, an unillustrated entry in a Sotheby's catalogue listed two bronze sculptures 'in Italian Renaissance style'. 

A Parisian art dealer bought the statues, and soon afterwards the Italian scholar Francesco Caglioti attributed the angels to Benedetto. In 2008, the second pair was discovered at Harrowden Hall, a country house in Northamptonshire owned by the Wellingborough Golf Club. The Sotheby's angels, it emerged, had been stolen from Harrowden in 1988. 

So, when Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich were loaned the four Angels by the V&A, I just had to see them. 

Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich

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