Hasketon

The following pages are all about Hasketon – the village where we’ve lived for the last 18 years. Whilst a proud native of nearby Woodbridge, I had to accept years ago that house prices there had become a bit silly, and that I really preferred the rural life anyway. Hasketon is great – it has a fantastic range of really nice people, an excellent pub, reasonably dark skies, lovely countryside, a beautiful church, pretty good internet connectivity, and is not that far away from anywhere you might want to get to. The A12 road is just a mile away and it’s just over 20 minutes drive to the coast. It also benefits from being on the flight path to Stansted Airport and receives regular flybys from Apache helicopters on their way to the maintenance depot at MOD Woodbridge. National Cycle Route 1 goes through the middle of the village.

Memories.

I think I first came to the village when I was about 11 – that would be 1969. At the time we were living in Woodbridge and as kids we used to cycle everywhere. I don’t think we even had a car then, and the roads were much safer. In June we could cycle over to Hasketon after school to a farm that I recall was somehere near Lowood, and pick strawberries. I think were paid about 10p for picking a basketfull, but it had to be a full one, with no lumps of earth or leaves. We’d then cycle back and spend most of our earnings on bottles of Coke at the back door of the Turks Head.

That, of course, is a memory. It’s almost certainly wrong – they usually are. I was a pupil at St. Marys primary school in Woodbridge way back in the 1960s, and every day a bus brought the children from Hasketon to attend the school, so I had several friends from the village even then.

Fast forward about 30 years when, having just got married, we were looking for a bigger house. We heard via a friend in the village that a house was about to go on the market and jumped without hesitation. We’re still here – the longest I’ve lived anywhere.