Representing England as much as St George and the Dragon, but far more true to life, is Willy Lott's House at Flatford. Don Black discusses how this English icon has survived.
No picture presents a perfect English scene so famously worldwide as The Hay Wain by John Constable.
Proof that its setting miraculously stays intact contrasts with the story of St George, patron saint of England, whose feast day we celebrate on Monday but whose existence can never be proved.
This spring sees completion of a process that began in the wartime year of 1943 with Flatford Mill and Willy Lott's house, on opposite sides of the millstream, coming into National Trust ownership.
Both were derelict when Thomas Partington of Ipswich bought them for presentation to the nation as a memorial to Constable.
Among perils the hamlet survived was an earthquake that, on April 22 1884, damaged 1,250 buildings in the Colchester area and may be remembered tomorrow with prayers in thanksgiving for minimal loss of life.
Flatford also escaped heavy 'touristic' development. The National Trust is buying The Granary, now a house, and the only building in Flatford not already belonging to the charity.
Derek Tripp, 82, and his wife Margery have lived there for the past 32 years, hiring out rowing boats, offering bed-and-breakfast and, until public admission made insurance prohibitive, opening part of the house as a museum.
'We've enjoyed our time here and we're going to to live in the same parish, East Bergholt,' explains Derek, who earlier sailed the seven seas with Blue Star Line.
Cargo-carrying barges on the canalised Stour have given way to a variety of small pleasure craft, including three kayaks that luckily filled the vacancy left by the haywain in our photo of Willy Lott's House.
Willy was born there and in all his 80 years spent only four nights away from home. In two festive weekends at Valley Farm, volunteers contrasted Christmas enjoyed by the relatively well-off Lott family of farmers with that of the less-prosperous Clarkes at Bridge Cottage.
Many of the volunteers who help make Flatford a lively place to visit are members of Colchester National Trust Centre and East Suffolk National Trust Association.
They've organised a joint St George's Day lunch at at the Holiday Inn, Copdock, highlighting their work together with outings and fund-raising for the past 40 years.
Not even the 'secret' that both banks of the River Stour at Flatford belong to Suffolk can divide them. The county boundary follows the ancient course of the river, not the present one.
Back in 1974 a campaign failed to transfer all north-east Essex into a united Suffolk. They have common interests, it was argued, not least in the Harwich Haven Authority that includes the vast Felixstowe port.
Some Essex guides still claim Flatford pictorially, but no matter. It's all Constable Country and JC himself crossed the border every day for his schooling at Dedham.
The Constable family has maintained continuity of interest in East Anglia that surely cannot be equalled by any other eminent artistic dynasty.
Although he was a great-great-grandson of his famous painter predecessor, the artist John Constable who died in 2002 aged 73 while playing golf at Aldeburgh, never imitated his ancestor's 'Haywain' style.
What they shared, as well as physical resemblance and natural talent, was admiration for the countryside.
Conservation of the Stour's long unspoilt reaches in the 21st century became a passion of the modern John Constable. He strongly opposed a scheme under consideration to spend more than £9 million on upgrading navigation in the river, which is currently limited to rowing boats and electric-powered craft.
The fact that he was president of the River Stour Trust, whose council endorsed the proposal, did not deter him from publicly airing his views,
'The Trust presents this development in terms of a misleadingly cosy Constable theme-park atmosphere, complete with horse-drawn barges,' he contended.
'Even modest growth in navigation would be a serious threat to the Stour valley. Very large scale expansion would be a disaster, not least for anyone who enjoys the sort of modest messing about in boats that the river at present supports.'
The ambitious project now lies forgotten in a backwater, but the River Stour Trust operates six electrically-powered passenger craft on reaches between Flatford and Dedham and at Sudbury.
John taught in Suffolk modern, comprehensive and grammar schools at Leiston, Claydon and Stowmarket and at Ipswich School of Art.
In 1963 he married Freda (nee Keable), an art historian, from Felixstowe.
In her biography of John Constable she wrote: 'The greatest memorial to John Constable RA, and the one he would have wished, remains fairly intact: the Stour valley itself.
'Although an imaginative main road slices across it at least the road does carry through traffic away from the villages and it is easy to see his paintings as he himself once saw pictures in the countryside.'
Freda and her John made their home in a succession of farmhouses, always as remote as they could be and including one near Dedham.
Their son - another John - taught English literature at Kyoto University in Japan, lectured at Magdalene College, Cambridge and has served as an executive with the Renewable Energy Foundation.
And in turn, his son John continues the family naming tradition that, almost without a break, goes back to the 18th century, when JC's father, Golding, was a miller and Stour navigation commissioner.
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