Woodton

Catherine Suckling was a Woodton girl and her family can be traced back to Saxon times when the name was ‘Socling’. And who was she!....Horatio Nelson’s mother.

In the churchyard is the tombstone of Ned Baldry, the huntsman, 1705-59. Robert Suckling gave him a job in his stables at the age of 13 as a parish apprentice so he may have been an orphan. He loved horses and hounds, said to be ‘the finest pack’ in the district, and became chief huntsman to the squire. So good at his job that he would take his pack as far afield as Ireland and to the court of Louis XV. On his gravestone are the lines:
Here lies a Huntsman who was stout and bold,
His judgment such as could not be controlled
Few of his calling with him compare
For skill in hunting fox or fallow deer
He shewed his art in England, Ireland France,
And rests in this churchyard, being his Last Chance.

Not far from Mr Baldry, in the woods along Nobb’s Lane there is, rather oddly, the grave of a horse, ‘April Shower’. A hunter, it broke its back in 1910 and had to be shot and now lies in a very superior railed grave.