From last year, I had been search­ing for a place in UK to shoot poppy fields. I never got proper infor­ma­tion on where I can find pop­pies and when. So when I saw some pho­tographs of poppy fields in Ipswich in a news­pa­per two weeks back, I jumped at the chance. I had to lit­er­ally drag my not-at-all-interested hus­band along to the vil­lage of Rush­mere St Andrew in Ipswich. To do just that– shoot a poppy field in full bloom.

It took almost three and a half hours to reach Ipswich Derby Road sta­tion in Ipswich by train. After hav­ing some fish and chips for lunch, we set out to Rush­mere St Andrew church, which was about 35 min­utes by walk, as per Google maps. We did not have a proper map and were reliant on Google maps and GPS. After promptly tak­ing one or two wrong turns on the road, we man­aged to find the longest route to the local church. After cov­er­ing almost all of the vil­lage, we finally reached Rush­mere St Andrew church just after 4pm. No small feat, con­sid­er­ing we had started at 9 in the morning.

It was a Sat­ur­day and the church was closed. We had to be con­tent with walk­ing around the com­pound and ceme­tery.  OK, now I will tell you why we had come to the church. In the pho­tos I saw of the poppy field, the church’s tower was vis­i­ble in the back­ground. So it had to be some­where near the church. As sim­ple as that. But after cir­cling the church once, I was not very sure any more. We checked from every cor­ner of the church com­pound and there were no poppy fields to be seen any­where. My hus­band was giv­ing me a know­ing look. Was that photo was taken with a really wide angle lens and the dis­tance between the church and pop­pies is actu­ally much more than it seems on the image? Was it a dif­fer­ent church in the photo? I tried to com­fort myself say­ing that will not be the case and it had to be some­where nearby.

I came out of the church feel­ing really bad. Then after cross­ing the road, there it was in front of us, a field painted in Red!

It was the first time I ever saw a poppy field in full bloom and it was really really beau­ti­ful. It was a cloudy and windy day and the pop­pies rejoiced sway­ing and danc­ing in the wind.

There was no other peo­ple out there– just rows upon rows of thou­sands of poppy flow­ers, pretty and delicate.

Even my not-very-impressed-by-flowers hus­band was impressed. And I was really happy that all that train jour­ney was worth it. I also fin­ished read­ing half of a novel in the train that day.

Thanks a lot to the reporter and pho­tog­ra­pher, whose report/photographs led me to this beau­ti­ful poppy field, which I would have never dis­cov­ered oth­er­wise.
Here is the link to the news arti­cle in Daily Mail.

Please visit the gallery for  more  poppy pho­tos from Rush­mere St Andrew.