The pie munchers ventured over the border to Yaxley in Suffolk to sample a foreign pie from over another border: pies from A. H. Butler & Son of March, Cambridgeshire. Sourced when the Pie Master was at “ Ear Ache”. Parking at the village hall, where later a fete would be held, 13 munchers and a conchie set off on a 6-mile appetiser, first visiting St. Mary’s church, Yaxley with an 
interesting grave stone and a gem of a scratch dial,
with half hour graduations! After a few yards along a road, we followed footpaths eastwards, south, then west for about three and a third miles before a short walk along roads to St. Mary’s Thornham Parva. This small church without a porch, was our lunch stop at just shy of four miles. The church had no scratch dials that we could find, and when everyone had been corralled, we headed north, then east and north again to reach Yaxley. Then despair! As we approached the Cherry Tree – it was closed. Then, carefully reading the sign outside, we found that the pub had relocated to the village hall to support the fete. Returning to the cars, the fete was underway with tug-o-war taking place. The bar was open, selling Adnams Bitter and Mauldons Mid Summer Gold – a pint of this in the hot sunshine could go to your head!
After purchasing a cake we retired to the cars for cups of tea and King prawns with a Marie Rose Sauce. Then the two large pies from March: a reasonable appearance and when cut yielded a pleasant aroma and revealed a nice amount of jelly. This found favour with the pie munchers coming in with a score of 8.34615 with a standard deviation of 0.98710. Don then produced a second pie that when sliced revealed a bright pink filling with plenty of seasoning but no jelly. Only some of the munchers sampled this as some had been tucking into the tasty cake and thought their palates were no longer fit for objective tasting. This pie from the King’s Head in Magdalen Street, Norwich scored 7.58333 with a small standard deviation of only 0.37639. So A. H. Butler scored a normalised 8.5 and the King’s Head a normalised 7.5.
A. H. Butler & Son pies remains of the King’s Head pie
All that remained was to have a group photograph of the massed munchers.
