The Suffolk Mummified Cat Safari
MATT SALUSBURY sets out on an unusual bus journey around West Suffolk in search of the region’s many preserved pussies and mummified moggies.
It was once common practice for cats or kittens to be walled up (sometimes alive) during the building of houses, to bring good luck and to ward off fires and evil spirits. They are still being uncovered, usually from spaces in roofs or around chimneys. (King James VI of Scotland, in his 1597 philosophical dissertation on witchcraft Daemonologie, discusses how malevolent spirits or “spectres” that trouble houses are most likely to enter them via the chimney.) Those entombed cats that haven’t rotted away mostly date from the 17th and 18th centuries and have been naturally mummified and preserved, giving them a scary, skeletal look, like hairless gremlins.
One such specimen turned up at The Trading Post curiosity shop in Wells, Somerset, in 2012 ( D.Mail, 9 May 2012), brought in by a customer who found it during restoration of their 300-year-old house. There’s a mummified cat on show at The Stag pub in Hastings, while the one you can see at Christ Church
Cathedral, Dublin, was found wedged up an organ pipe.
Although mummified cats on display in the British Isles are a bit unevenly distributed, fans of the slightly gruesome artefacts can take in an easily do-able cluster of them in the western half of the county of Suffolk. They’re even handily all on the same bus route; and if you’re doing the West Suffolk mummified cat safari by car, it’s all within easy reach of the A134.
The best place to start your tour is in Bury St Edmunds – Just “Bury” to locals, and always pronounced “berry”. There are two mummified cats and two mummified kittens on display in Bury’s 12th century Moyse’s Hall, now a museum. It also has some examples of an Elizabethan regional speciality in its public collection – witch bottles. These are earthenware bottles filled with pins, needles and nails and concealed as a protection against witches (see FT359:3237).
Moyse’s Hall’s mummified kittens are part of the Barley House Hoard, from a farm in the mid-Suffolk village of Winston. This hoard of objects deliberately dropped into a space near the chimney dates from around 1650 to 1730 and includes six felines in total, with a rat (sadly currently not on display at Moyse’s Hall), many shoes, pigs’ trotters, goose wing bones with notches cut in them and plenty else besides that presumably brought good luck. The scored goose bones could have been some form of crude almanac recording saints’ days.
The Barley House Hoard is one of four “spiritual middens” in the county of Suffolk, accumulations of stuff found in houses dropped into spaces around the chimney for good luck, sometimes spaces specially built into a dwelling.
Other such Suffolk lucky hoards include Cutchey’s Farm – a broken firkin lid, horseshoes, padlocks, stirrups, a shoe with a hole in it, through which a rat skull was found protruding, along with loads of other stuff. Archæologist Timothy ND Easton described (in Historical
Archaeology, 2013, 47, 1) how Cutchey’s Farm’s then owner, facing a run of financial bad luck after parting with the hoard in the 1980s, begged for the return of the “lucky” items. They eventually settled on the re-internment of a single child’s shoe.
Suffolk hoards of lucky charms have also been pulled out of houses at Hestley Hall – broken pots, chicken’s feet, fruit stones and more – and Earl Soham – over 30 shoes from the 1830s, gloves, a bottle containing a horse medicine made from hornbill glands from India, a pair of braces, a framed mirror, and a bunch of lavender. Earl Soham’s 19th century hoard was less a collection of lucky items than a sort of early time capsule.
Another six mummified cats were discovered by builders doing work on a house in Fakenham Magna, not far from Bury, in 1972. (They’re not on display anywhere as far as I know.) The builders reported being scared by strange tapping noises and footsteps while working on the property.
Also in Bury, a few minutes walk from Moyse’s Hall, is The Nutshell pub – allegedly Britain’s smallest public house – which has a fine, leathery specimen of a mummified cat hanging from the ceiling, along with all the foreign banknotes that have ended up there over the years. Should you find yourself in the pedestrianised centre of Bury, the pub is well worth a visit.
In its bar – just 15ft by 7ft – it’s almost impossible not to get pulled into one of the conversations going on there, often among Bury’s tiny “alternative” community. If you can’t fight banter with even better banter, it’s probably not for you.
Ask nicely for permission to photograph their magnificent mummified cat, and whatever you do, do NOT touch it. Like a lot of East Anglian mummified cats, there’s said to be a curse attached to it. I heard an apocryphal tale about The Nutshell’s mummified cat being stolen, as a result of a prank by “other ranks” in a locally based military unit, only for it to be returned not long after by a grim-faced off duty soldier (out of uniform but still identifiable by his haircut) who turned up at the pub at opening time and handed it back without a word.
From Bury bus station, the Chambers 753 bus takes you on an uneventful 35-minute drive to Lavenham. Most of the rural rides round here are on double deckers, so enjoy the view.
You know you’ve arrived in the village of Lavenham, with its 321 listed buildings, when the houses all go a bit mental – suddenly every building is a half-timbered, eccentric, wonkyangled extravagance with insane overhangs, often painted in bizarre colours. Look down any side street and every building in it has just the same level of mediæval madness. It used to be one of the Wool Towns, where immensely wealthy wool magnates settled. While it’s a town no more, most of its 15th and 16th century Wool Town era houses still stand.
Head straight for Lavenham’s white-painted Guildhall with its elaborately carved timbers. It once housed a jail, but now it’s a National Trust property and local museum whose magnificent mummified cat is worth the price of admission alone.
He goes by the name of Rameses and was found hidden in a roof in one of the nearby houses. So magnificently well preserved is he that he still has the tips of his ears and most of his whiskers. None of the staff could tell me why he’s called Rameses, although I suspect it’s something to do with Egyptians and mummification.
If you have time to kill in Lavenham before the 753 bus (from The Swan pub) takes you onward to your next mummified cat stop in Sudbury, there’s the DeVere House. This 14th century red brick and halftimbered residence was world famous even before it featured as Harry Potter’s decaying birthplace and ancestral home in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. Check out also the Market Square, which stood in for the market square
He still has the tips of his ears and most of his whiskers