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5th July 2016 Hiking - Walking: Ipswich’s ‘Pigs Gone Wild’ Wind Direction: Wind Stength: Surf / Sea State: Air Temperature: Sea Temperature: Weather: sunny periods Max Speed: Distance Covered: 9 miles (Nautical Miles - unless stated otherwise) Tuesday 5th July – walk ***** Ipswich’s ‘Pigs Gone Wild’ sunny periods. Out 5hrs covering nearly 9 miles! After a leisurely start, with the wind off-shore and a cloudy sky but the promise of improving weather later, we decided to go and try to complete the Pigs gone wild Trail of 69 pig sculptures around Ipswich. We collected a free map from the St. Elizabeth’s hospice charity shop in Felixstowe on the way. There are 39 adult pigs designed by various artists and 30 piglets designed by local schools. The whole event is part of Suffolk’s Year of Walking, encouraging exercise for all generations and equally importantly raising funds for St. Elizabeth’s hospice. The adult pigs are going to be auctioned off at the end of September. We decided to start our trail in Holywells Park – always one of our favourite parts of Ipswich. It would be impossible to mention every one of the pigs we saw but they were all amazing in their own way and we managed to see 67 out of the 69. We only missed two of the small ones. All the adult ones have a plaque with a letter on so you can collect the letters and work out the sentence which could win you a holiday. They were quite spaced out around the town and we covered nearly 9 miles!! We had to go to the Railway Station, the Council Offices and even more obscurely Jimmy’s farm which is about 6 miles away from the town centre on the way home! Some of the pigs were inside various café’s, shops, churches, the town hall, library, information centres etc. It was a really brilliant day out and we met some great people. Nearly every pig had somebody near it either taking part in the whole thing or just stumbling across one by accident and showing interest. The age range of the people with maps on a mission ranged from parents with their kids whose teachers were on strike, teenagers using Aps to scan the plaques on their smart phones, working people on their lunch breaks and most surprisingly of all a retired couple from Bristol who go all over the country to these things!! Giraffes in Colchester, Elephants in Sheffield – who knew! They arrived in Ipswich last night, checked into the Premier Inn and will do the trail over the next couple of days – what a great way to see the country! We had conversations with two men in orange jackets eating their lunch on a bench in the town centre and a rather inebriated man on another bench who was very proud of the fact that he had completed the trail and submitted his entry to the competition on Sunday! We were also thrilled to see Lorna who we childminded when she was a baby until the age of 6. She is a wonderful 22 year old young lady and we chatted to her for nearly half an hour. We also met the man who introduced us to each other over 40 years ago!! A really unexpected trip down memory lane on the waterfront! Anyway, back to the pigs – our favourites were local hero Ed Sheer-ham who was positioned outside the University entrance and we recognised before reading the plaque, Pinata Piggy on the waterfront, Pepper Pig (actually decorated with paintings of coloured salad veg peppers), and probably the most intricate one, the pigs might fly pig in the Sailmakers shopping precinct (used to be Tower Ramparts). Our favourite small pig was in the Town Hall and designed by the schools our boys attended in Felixstowe, Fairfield and Colneis – he had the two parts of Felixstowe on either side, the beach and beach huts on one side and the docks on the other – brilliant :) We ate our lunch in Christchurch Park and had a well deserved rest near the lake before tackling the second half. We were walking for nearly 5 hours and shared the last mile with a very nice man who had no idea how to get to Holywells park so he joined us and told us his life story. The Jimmy’s farm pig earned us a place in a long traffic jam as the A12 was closed due to an accident and the world and his wife were using the small roads to try to avoid the hold ups!! A great day and well worth a visit if you get the chance :) Pigs gone wild Photo gallery here |
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