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Five miles or so north of Colchester, the Stour River Valley forms the border between Essex and Suffolk, and signals the beginning of East Anglia proper. Compared with much of the region it is positively hilly, a handsome landscape of farms and woodland latticed by dense, well-kept hedges and thick grassy banks that once kept the Stour in check. The valley is dotted with lovely little villages, where rickety, half-timbered Tudor houses and elegant Georgian dwellings cluster around medieval churches, proud buildings with square, self-confident towers. The Stour's prettiest villages are concentrated along its lower reaches - to the east of the A134 - in Dedham Vale, with Stoke-by-Nayland and Dedham arguably the most appealing of them all. The vale is also known as "Constable Country" , as it was the home of John Constable, one of England's greatest artists, and the subject of his most famous works. Inevitably, there's a Constable shrine - the much-visited complex of old buildings down by the river at Flatford Mill . The villages along the River Stour and its tributaries were once busy little places at the heart of East Anglia's weaving trade, which boomed from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. By the 1490s, the region produced more cloth than any other part of the country, but in Tudor times production shifted to Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich. Bypassed by the Industrial Revolution, south Suffolk had, by the late nineteenth century, become a remote rural backwater, an impoverished area whose decline had one unforeseen consequence. With few exceptions, the towns and villages were never well enough off to modernize, and the architectural legacy of medieval and Tudor times survived. The two best-preserved villages are Lavenham and Kersey , both of which heave with sightseers on summer weekends, but there are other attractive spots too, notably Sudbury . The latter boasts an excellent museum devoted to the work of Thomas Gainsborough, another great English artist and a native of the town who spent much of his time painting the local landscape. Seeing the region by public transport is problematic - distances are small (Dedham Vale is only about ten miles long), but buses between the villages are infrequent and you'll find it difficult to get away from the towns. Several rail lines cross south Suffolk, the most useful being the London-Colchester-Sudbury route. The area is crisscrossed by footpaths , some of the most enjoyable of which are in the vicinity of Dedham village.
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