Ditchingham is a village and civil parish in the Englishcounty of Norfolk. It is located across the River Waveney from Bungay, Suffolk near to The Broads National Park. The civil parish has an area of and in the 2001 census had a population of 1614 in 695 households, increasing to 1,635 in 707 households at the 2011 Census. Ditchingham is the home of the "Chicken Roundabout", a traffic roundabout inhabited by a colony of chickens which has survived the construction of a bypass through their home. An attempt by the authorities to move them led to protests by local residents.
History
In the middle ages Ditchingham consisted of the manors of Ditchingham and Pirnhow. In the Domesday Book of 1086 the lord of the manor of Pirnhow was Roger Bigot. The town or village of Pirnhow was demolished long ago. The exact site of the manor house of Pirnhow Hall is unknown. In 1855 Lavinia Crosse founded the AnglicanCommunity of All Hallows in Ditchingham. The novelist Sir H. Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon's Mines, lived in Ditchingham, at Ditchingham House on the Norwich Road, and was churchwarden there for several years. He was born in Kessingland and had connections with the church in Bungay. Lilias Rider Haggard, the novelist's daughter, edited I walked by Night, being the life and history of the King of the Norfolk Poachers, published in 1935 by Nicholson and Watson, London. She also edited The Rabbit Skin Cap, a tale of a Norfolk countryman's youth, first published in 1939 and reprinted by the Norfolk Library, 1974, 1975, 1976, which is the life story of George Baldry, a local inventor and poacher in the early C20. The picture on the front cover of the hardback edition was of a Ditchingham school boy, Douglas Walter Gower, taken from a painting by the artist Edward Seago. The boy later in life found a mammoth's tooth in a gravel pit near an ancient long barrow on the Broome Heath, which is now in the Norwich Castle museum. Victoria Cross recipientVictor Buller Turner lived at Ditchingham from after the Second World War until his death in 1972, and his ashes are buried in St Mary's churchyard.
Governance
For the purposes of local government, the parish falls within the district of South Norfolk. A new two-member electoral ward in the name of Ditchingham and Earsham was created for the 2019 district council elections. The electorate of the ward for that election was 5,132.
