The Beast from the East arrived yesterday.

Santon Downham got of lightly in terms of snow but was still one of the coldest places in the country.(in Fact we were probably the coldest).

The BBC reported that temperatures dropped well below freezing overnight, with Northern Ireland, south west England and East Anglia logging figures as low as -6C.

Altnaharra in the Highlands recorded -8.5C overnight.

Looking at the WeatherCast data for Santon Downham, we were even colder with temperatures reaching -8.7C at 7.00am this morning!!!.

Between 6-10pm on the evening of Wednesday, 14th February 2018 a Green and Yellow Quad Bike was stolen from the driveway of one of the village residents The owner notes that the bike had a flat battery so it is likely that it would have had to be pushed towards/onto a vehicle.

If anyone saw anything suspicious could they please contact the Parish Clerk on 01842 815213 or email silv1948@sky.com.

The theft has been reported to the Police.

The original 22 Village “Website” has been republished on this site.

It’s a facinating snapshot of local and internet history. – 22 Villages

We’ve had a query submitted regarding a photograph on the website.

The photo in question is the 1955 Christmas party:

Can anyone recognise Tony Marsh, son of Dot and Joe who worked for the forestry commission. He was definitely in Santon then as he would have been 13 when this photo was taken.

The query came from his son Richard.

We’ve just discovered that Santon Downham was featured in 2013 in a Radio 4 program about Golden Pheasants.

St Mary’s church is visited as part of the Living World series which discusses the history of Golden Pheasants in the UK

The program is available on BBC IPlayer (As this is from 2013 unlike most Iplayer programs these seem to be available forever).

St Mary’s is the first item on the show and talks about the stained glass window (see right) in the church

On Sunday 17th Dec the owner of LIttle Lodge Farm arranged a “stroll” down to Santon Downham.

A group of about 30 dressed up their horses, children and adults to take a stroll down to Santon Downham for mulled wine and mince pies in the Club..

The weather held off until later and the event was well attended with a reporter from the EDP turning up. (will link to their story when I find it)

Fibre broadband has been available since May.

We’ve been a BT customer since then and were regularly achieving download speeds of 52Mbps (52 Meg / 52Mb). Not bad for what many consider a rural not-spot.

Recently BT have upgraded our service to “Upto 77Mb”.

We were somewhat skeptical about this as we were not convinced the copper wire between us and the exchange could cope with this. (it used to behave very badly when it rained).

However since the upgrade we’ve been able to achieve over 70Mbps consistently and have managed 73Mbps on occassion.

This does require some effort as both the router and connected devices need to be configured properly and using the latest/fastest wifi modes. (We needed a new Wifi dongle ~ £10 to take advantage of it).