Ditchingham

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ditchingham is a village and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk. It is located across the River Waveney from Bungay, Suffolk near to The Broads National Park. ^[1]

The civil parish has an area of 8.56 km² and in the 2001 census had a population of 1614 in 695 households. For the purposes of local government, the parish falls within the district of South Norfolk.^[2]

The novelist Sir H. Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon's Mines, lived in Ditchingham and was churchwarden there for several years. He was born in Kessingland and had connections with the church in Bungay.

Lilias Rider Haggard the daughter of Henry the famous novelist edited I walked by Night, being the life and history of the King of the Norfolk Poachers. First published in 1935 by Nicholson and Watson, London.

She also edited The Rabbit Skin Cap, a tale of a Norfolk countryman's youth. First published 1939. Reprinted by the Norfolk Library, 1974, 1975, 1976 which is the life story of George Baldry a local inventor and poacher in the early c20. The picture on the front cover of the hardback edition was of a Ditchingham school boy Douglas Walter Gower taken from a painting by the artist, Edward Seago. The boy later in life found a mammoths tooth in a gravel pit near to an ancient long barrow on the Broome Heath see Prehistoric Norfolk, which is now in the Norwich Castle museum.

In 1855 Lavinia Crosse founded the Anglican Community of All Hallows in Ditchingham.

Parravanis ice creams were established in the village in the early c20 and Lamberts Coaches are another long established company.

Much of the land surrounding the village belongs to the Ditchingham Hall estate the seat of Earl Ferrers. The current owner is Robert Shirley, 13th Earl Ferrers former Conservative leader of the House of Lords.