In 1885, the town clerk of Hythe, in Kent, made a discovery that took ninety years to fully resolve. He proved that Eye, in Suffolk, had been operating for centuries under a royal borough charter that did not actually belong to it. The original document referred to a different Eye - the name was an easy confusion in early English - and the rights, formally speaking, belonged only to Hythe. The mistake was confirmed by archivists in the 1950s. Eye's borough status was finally discontinued in 1974 during a national reorganisation of local government, though the town kept its mayor, its council and its insignia. Eight hundred years of municipal life, conducted under a paperwork error. The name itself comes from the Old English for 'island, land by water'. The first settlement here was almost surrounded by the marshes and braided channels of the River Dove. The area still floods.
In 1781, labourers working in a field at Clint Farm by the river unearthed a lead box. Inside it were about six hundred Roman gold coins. The dates ran from the reigns of Valens and Valentinian I (364-375) through Gratian, Theodosius I, Arcadius and Honorius (393-423) - in other words, from the late Western Roman Empire through to the years of its collapse in Britain. Someone living in or near Eye, around the start of the fifth century, had buried their savings and never come back for them. Buildings and earlier coins of around 365 CE confirm a Roman presence at the site. The earliest finds in the area predate even that - Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age artefacts have all been excavated around the town. But it is the Roman hoard, hidden as the empire withdrew, that gives the most vivid glimpse of who lived here and what they were afraid of.
Before the Norman Conquest, the land around Eye belonged to Edric of Laxfield - the third-largest Saxon landholder in Suffolk. The Conquest swept Edric's holdings into the hands of William Malet, a Norman lord granted what became known as the Honour of Eye. Between 1066 and 1071, Malet built a motte-and-bailey castle as his military and administrative headquarters and laid out a market beside it. The market made the town. The Honour eventually grew to 129 manors, with the right to hold a court of pie poudre - literally 'dusty feet', a temporary justice for travelling merchants - at the Whit Monday fairs in Eye, Thrandeston and Finningham. The castle, however, did not last. It was attacked in 1173 by Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, during a rebellion against Henry II, and again during the Second Barons' War of 1265. After that it never recovered its strategic importance. The prison cells stayed in use into the early seventeenth century; the rest of the buildings were progressively demolished in the fourteenth. A windmill stood on the empty motte from 1561 to 1562, and in 1844 a circular mock keep was built on the same mound, which is what visitors see today.
Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington, was born in 1674 and served as MP for Eye. He went on to become Speaker of the House of Commons from 1715 to 1727, and then - on Robert Walpole's resignation in 1742 - the second Prime Minister of Great Britain. He died in office in 1743. Compton was not a forceful Prime Minister; his reputation as a slow, courteous administrator has lasted better than his political achievements. Sir Frederick Ashton, born in 1904, lived at Chandos Lodge in Eye for years - behind a local landmark called the Crinkle Crackle Wall, a serpentine garden wall whose name describes its profile exactly. Ashton was one of the founding choreographers of the Royal Ballet, the architect of mid-twentieth century English ballet style. He kept his country house in Eye through the decades of his greatest work and is buried alongside his sister at nearby Yaxley. The New Zealand author Janet Frame rented a cottage at Braiseworth, just outside Eye, for some months in 1963-64. There she began An Adaptable Man, a novel set in the local area in which Eye appears, lightly disguised, as 'Murston'.
Eye's Grade I listed Church of St Peter and St Paul, fourteenth century in its present form, is regarded as one of the finest parish churches in Suffolk. Its most striking interior feature is a late fifteenth-century rood screen with a loft and rood designed by the church architect Ninian Comper in 1925 - a careful Edwardian reconstruction in medieval style, completed during the years when Comper was working out the principles of his decorated Gothic Revival. The town's other notable building is the Town Hall of 1856, an imaginative and unorthodox structure designed by Edward Buckton Lamb. Lamb was one of the Victorian rogue architects - mid-century English designers who refused to settle into either Gothic or Classical conventions and produced eccentric, individual buildings that did not fit into the standard categories of the day. The Town Hall is Grade II* listed. To the north-east of the town, Eye Airfield - originally RAF Eye, home of the USAAF's 490th Bomb Group from 1944 - is now an industrial estate. The 490th Bombardment Group flew B-17s and B-24s from here against targets across Germany. A memorial to the men who served there was unveiled in 2016.
Eye sits at 52.32 degrees north, 1.15 degrees east, in north Suffolk close to the Norfolk border. The River Waveney runs east-west to the north of the town; the smaller River Dove curves through it. Recommended viewing altitude is 1,500-2,500 feet. The market square and church are at the centre of the town; the castle motte rises on the western edge. The former Eye Airfield (RAF Eye) lies to the north-east. The A140 (Ipswich-Norwich) is the main road through the area. Nearest active airfields are RAF Marham (EGYM) to the west, Norwich (EGSH) to the east, and RAF Wattisham (EGUW) to the south. The area is flat and prone to low cloud after dark; mornings are clearer than afternoons.