Picture Post: The Guardian does the WW

THE ARTICLE is great too, but I fell in love with this image the minute I opened Saturday’s Guardian. Rachel Tudor Best is the artist. I think she’s summed up the Wherryman’s Way in a very beautiful and succinct way. See Patrick Barkham’s accompanying words here. Click on the artwork to bring it up full frame and you might spot Billy Bluelight.

Picture Post: St Wandregesilius by air

DID I mention that aerial photographer Mike Page has more than 45,000 images in his collection? After Buckenham and Cantley (see previous post), he’s just dropped this one into my inbox. It shows the burnt out ruin of St Wandregesilius at Bixley taken a few summers ago. (Read the full sad story here.) That southern wall looks all the more precarious from on high …little more than a facade. How long can it survive in that state I wonder. Thanks again Mike.

Picture Post: Buckenham and Cantley

AERIAL photographer Mike Page continues to get some great shots. These latest photos show just how wet the Yare Valley is after a sodden start to 2013. From a WW perspective the first one also shows just how splendidly isolated The Beauchamp Arms is. That’s Carleton Beck winding its way down to the river in the foreground. The road to the pub is shown by the avenue of poplars. Buckenham Marshes lie on the other bank. And with Katy W’s help, we think that the light-coloured building almost on the horizon is Hassingham Church.

This next one downriver is even wetter. We’re now looking across the marshes towards Cantley with the sugar works looking oddly insignificant on the far left. Thanks as ever to Mike for his generosity in sharing his photos.

* Mike Page’s website can be found here.

Woods End takes it to the Edge

IT’S all change at The Woods End at Bramerton. This historic pub re-opened just over a week ago with a complete new look. In fact it’s now “Water’s Edge, Woods End” with new leaseholder Lee Webb determined to throw off a bad reputation – especially online. That’s the power of Tripadvisor: that’s the tyranny of Tripadvisor some would say.

The master plan, says Lee, is to make the Water’s Edge a “destination restaurant” with the main market being the thousands of people down the road in Norwich. Wherryman’s Way walkers will rejoice that it’s to become an all-day venue too. He’s not there yet, but the plan is for an 8am start with breakfast, coffee and Danish pastries available for hungry ramblers.

And while he’s a leaseholder, he stresses that he pays rent  to a property management company rather than a pub chain. In other words he’s not tied, drinks-wise. Real ale fans are offered Greene King IPA, Old Speckled Hen and Woodforde’s Wherry. On the menu; starters of leek and potato soup, crispy pork belly, pan-seared queen scallops, salmon gravadlax and icelandic prawns; the mains are more crispy pork belly, crispy chilli beef, pan-seared sea bass and char-grilled sirloin steak. Starters are £5 or £6. Mains vary from £8.95 to £18.95.

Above all, he stresses, he wants to be reliable. Always open, seven days a week, without the annoying hand-written “Due to Family Illness…” notes that have been known here in the past.

So can he make a go of it? Maybe it’s because I’ve written so many of these New Dawn pieces that I’ve grown a bit more world-weary with each one. Lee’s answer though, is resolutely upbeat. “I’m going to bring service back to the industry,” he says. “If you’re going to have to keep getting up to get served you might as well be at home. We’ll come to you and we’ll look after you.”

There’s been no big launch yet. He’s been happy to let people find him so far. But 130 covers for Mothering Sunday wasn’t bad for Day Three. Good luck to you, Sir.

* Read about the last new dawn at Woods End in 2010 and my bid for “Boots as well as boats” in 2009.

Langley Staithe: still good for bad birdwatchers

THIS miserable winter deigned to ease a little this afternoon. But while the thermometer in my garden claimed 8 degrees, it didn’t feel like it down at Langley Staithe.

This beautiful spot continues however, to offer easy pickings for the lazy birdwatcher. I spotted the first barn owl before I’d even got out of the car. Unusually he was hovering over the water before retreating to his favourite patch – the marshland to the south of Langley Dyke. A  heron was there too, looking to go fishing in one of the smaller dykes that criss-cross this landscape. Then a kestrel with surprisingly yellow talons in the woods to the north of the dyke and finally a second barn owl up towards the Yare.

Normally the owls glide gracefully. Today’s Force 5 meant it was all a bit hurried and hurtled. But throw in a couple of crested grebes on the river and it wasn’t a bad haul for 15 minutes work.

Then the sky grew black from the east, the wind picked up and the rain started. There’s nowhere to hide out here. The grebes’ ornate head plumes started to look ruffled, the kestrel retreated grumpily along the telegraph poles as I approached and the owls disappeared completely. Winter was back and we all went somewhere warmer.

* Photo by Nigel Blake taken from the RSPB website. More on barn owls from them here.

* My drivetime Barn Owl article here.

Langley: WW footpath closed till May

A REMINDER that the Wherryman’s Way footpath between Langley Staithe and Hardley Staithe remains closed.

The paperwork next to the stile says it will re-open on May 17th once flood defence work has been completed. In the meantime walkers are denied any riverside access between The Beauchamp Arms and Hardley. 

Bixley: St Wandregesilius– a revival?

REMEMBER St Wandregesilius? The gutted church in the hamlet of Bixley which I visited last October. Destroyed by arsonists in 2004 and almost untouched ever since, I said it was the saddest and most unloved place I’d ever been to in Norfolk.  Well I stand by “saddest”, but perhaps I was wrong about “unloved”. Here’s a comment posted on the blog soon afterwards by Mark Tatum-Smith from the Orthodox Church of the Joy of All Who Suffer at Mettingham in the Waveney Valley:

Hello Steve, I just came across your blog post now and share your sense that Bixley is a hallowed and special place. You may be interested to learn, however, that our church has established a clear historical link with this ancient shrine, and that just over a year ago we commissioned a new ikon of St Wandregesilius, translated the life from the French edition as well as composing a canon (series of hymns) in his honour.

You can read the full document here. In essence the church has traced a link between Mettingham (through its ancient castle) and Bixley. Today’s trustees in Mettingham see St W as “an inspiring and holy saint, as relevant for us today as he was for our ancestors in earlier times.” 

They continue: “Whilst St Wandregesilius was never able to fulfil his wish to make a pilgrimage to the British Isles, the trustees hope that the publication of this Life and the painting of a new ikon of him will spiritually bring this Saint of God back to this area where his relics and holy memory were once so honoured.”

Intriguing. Who knows what that might mean for the Bixley church in the long term.

* See the first article here.

Loddon: Aston before villas

IT’S only the Nissen huts on the right of the picture that help me place this scene. Everything else about Loddon Staithe is totally unrecognisable 50 years on. Both boats and buildings belonged to the company which was known as Princess Cruisers and Aston Boats.

This is 1961 as the hire boat boom was gathering pace across the Broads. And it’s one of a number of great photos lent to me by Terry Howes, whose father Ron was yard foreman in the 1950s and 1960s. Before escapes to a Spanish villa became commonplace, a two-week holiday on the Broads was a big adventure. I’d love to know how many people the industry employed in Loddon in those years. Boats are still being hired from Loddon of course. But it’s much of a niche market these days.

Loddon: all aboard in 1917

DON’T you love the health and safety on board this wherry in 1917? And half of them are presumably medical staff. I know that there was some sort of war hospital within the Lecture Hall on George Lane in Loddon during World War One: so I’m guessing these are both staff and the fitter patients making the most of a sunny day.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the Chet at Loddon looks very different a century on. So different that it is probably difficult for most incomers to get their bearings. Let’s start with the large chimney at the centre of the photo. I’m taking it that that belonged to the old engine house next to Loddon Mill. (The part of the building which now holds comedy nights incidentally.) Work back from there and I am pretty sure everything on the far bank belonged to the seed merchants Woods, Sadd, Moore and Company. All that disappeared in the 1960s and 1970s, to be replaced in the early Noughties by new housing.

But where’s the photographer standing? Well probably in the middle of what is now the basin dug out for Princess Cruisers. That’s what makes the shot so unusual to modern eyes I guess.

The picture is one of a number of great photos lent to me by life-long Loddonite Terry Howes. As we know, all the best photos are in the loft, in this case the loft of Terry’s father Ron Howes who has just celebrated his 85th birthday. Mr Howes senior was foreman of the yard at Princess Cruisers in the 1950s and 1960s. Terry’s lent me a few photos from that era too. More next time …and a fuller collection on flickr too.

Picture Post: The Chet in the snow

THE light was poor and the sky was grey. But there’s a rule that if there’s snow on the ground I have to walk down to Hardley Flood and see what’s going on. I’m not entirely sure why. It was bitingly cold of course and an easterly was whipping powdery snow off the trees and straight onto the camera lens. Parts of the Chet have frozen, but most was still liquid. It’s not quite the deep freeze of winter 2010 – at least not yet.

Frozen in at Loddon Staithe

Bleak on the path between Chet and Flood.

High Tide ice. (See also cardboard ice.)

Rockland St Mary: The New Inn closes

SAD news for the New Year at Rockland where the New Inn has once more closed its doors. Mick and Paula Walker (pictured) took over in late 2011 and gave it a good go – no-one had a bad word to say about them. But by the looks of it the numbers didn’t add up, so once again Rockland finds itself without a pub in the bleak mid-winter. It’s happened a number of times before. What’s the solution this time? Answers on a comment page please.

* More articles on the New Inn here.

* Lots of comments on the Norfolk Broads Forum here

A sell-out at the Farmers' Market

THINK "Farmers' Markets" and you probably think of smallholders selling their cabbages next to farmers flogging a bit of beef. Those guys are there of course. But next door you'll find all manner of hobbyists too. People who just love baking bread. The hospital consultant brewing beer in his garage. And yes, me with my books, getting as evangelical about canoeing the Broads as every other stallholder is about their thing.

So I was actually a bit gutted when the publishers called to say that they've sold out of "The Wherryman's Way". There are probably a few copies still available at Jarrolds in Norwich and perhaps Waterstones. But no more for me. And unlike the brewer and the baker I'm in the hands of someone else when it comes to a second edition. (Halsgrove don't order a reprint until they're convinced that enough people would buy it. Feel free to email them via this link if you're in that category.)

If it did go to a second edition what should I change? Langley Abbey has opened up to the public, that's a must. And I want to include the Humpty Dumpty Brewery which for some reason I completely ignored in the Reedham chapter. Various pubs have had makeovers so I'll need to get the camera out in Rockland and Loddon. Conversely there's still no progress on The Ferry Boat in Norwich despite grand plans for a backpackers' hostel. The big casualty has been Steve "Tug" Wilson - skipper of The Southern Belle whose cruises up the Yare from Great Yarmouth have now come to an end. What should fill the gap in that chapter do you think?

And where did I get wrong. If you've winced at some howler now's your chance. Email me at sanddsilk@btinternet.com. In the meantime give Loddon Farmers' Market a go this Saturday. Even if the guy with the books won't be there for a while.

Langley and Hardley: Boat owners beware

This is word for word from Norfolk Police:

Police are reappealing for information following a number of thefts from boats in the Loddon area. Since Sunday 18 November 2012 items including outboard motors, a dinghy and navigation lights have been stolen from Hardley Dyke, Langley Dyke and Langley Staithe. Boat owners and users are requested to ensure they do not leave items of property on display, secure their vessels and take down any aerials or antennas when not in use. Be vigilant and report anything suspicious to police. Anyone with information about these thefts should contact Loddon Safer Neighbourhood Team on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

The Cockatrice: Who was One-Armed Carver?

MYTHS already abound about the isolated former pub alongside the Yare known as “The Cockatrice”. All the old boys say that this building – miles from any other on the road from Norton Subcourse to Reedham Ferry – was the haunt of smugglers. Certainly its location lends itself to those sort of rumours. It’s been a house – rather than an inn - for more than 80 years now. But selling books at Loddon Farmers’ Market today, I heard a snippet of surely another great story …that this building was once the home of “One-Armed Carver”.

Who he was and how he lost his arm are both unknown to me so far – although I know there was once an abbatoir here. Is that a gruesome clue? But I’m told by The Cockatrice’s new owner Sarah that he lived there some time after the building stopped being a pub. And rather bizarrely he used to use the grazing marshes nearby to race his greyhounds. Curiouser and curiouser. I’d love to know more. Get in touch if you can help.

* A cockatrice was a serpent hatched from a cock's egg which had the power to kill at a glance. The building – see below – is slightly more conventional.

Thorpe next Haddiscoe: marsh upon marsh

THE FLAT landscape down at Thorpe Marshes plays tricks on your eyes and your ears. It’s so open that the usual rules just don’t seem to apply. Find yourself somewhere to park near the beautifully ancient round tower church in the windswept hamlet of Thorpe next Haddiscoe, then take the footpath which heads across the marshes just south of Thorpe Hall.

You walk next to a small bedraggled wood, home to a few hundred noisy rooks and crows. Then you’re out onto mile upon mile of mucky grazing marsh. The Lowestoft to Norwich railway line spans the horizon, But because the horizon is so vast you can only hear a train as it rattles alongside the New Cut at Reedham. Watch it head towards Suffolk and you suddenly realise the sound has disappeared, picked up (today at least) by a south-westerly and hurled towards Somerleyton.

At one end of the horizon Cantley belches out its sugary steam. A shotgun or two was being fired down at Thurlton and somewhere else upwind a lonely cow lowed. Then that strange almost factory-type sound as a trio of swans passed directly overheard.

Grazing marsh is of course only one step up from “natural” marsh. The OS Map shows countless dykes criss-crossing this landscape, just about keeping it dry enough to keep your wellies on. And along with these dykes there are countless gates like the one in the main photo; their characteristic panels designed to stop stupid cattle taking a bath. (Does anyone know their proper name?)

It’s not the kind of walk I’d recommend for your London friends. The only windmill was distant and derelict. And it was all too big to feel like you were even getting from A to B. But now I’ve done 20-odd years in Norfolk I think I’m starting to appreciate its bleak beauty.

Langley: new home for old sign

IT’S about two years since I had a brief guided tour of the old Wherry pub at Langley with builder Gary Hayes: two years since Gary was converting the building into a house and we agreed that the old pub sign would be better off in my garage than in his skip. Well as of today it’s got a new home – courtesy of the grandson of an old landlord.

Peter Russell from Maidstone got in touch after doing a bit of family tree work. His grandfather John Preece had been the publican here in the early 1920s. Family legend says that he left because his wife Alice found the whole business rather uncouth. (And Broads legend has it that wherrymen were a hard-drinking bunch and since they would have been the pub’s main clientele, this sort of makes sense.)

Mr Preece moved to Kent as a result and two generations later Peter is still there. But he and his wife are also enjoying exploring Norfolk now that they’ve got the connection. They’re even planning a walk along the Wherryman’s Way next year. They may live far from the Wherry’s heartland, but I think the pub sign has found a good home.

* Original article here.

Bixley: the unloved St Wandregesilius

YOU can blame City Bookshop in Norwich for this one. Because as well as shelf upon shelf of local books, they sell all manner of leaflets and magazines. Nothing is too obscure or too humble. Which is why I found myself paying 75p for a single sheet of folded paper containing  a short typewriter-era history of “The Parish Church of St Wandregesilius, Bixley”. And once you’ve got that, you’ve simply got to visit the building.

It’s quite the saddest place I think I’ve ever been to in Norfolk. Not because it’s deserted, I normally love the sense of history that reeks from ruined churches. More because even a cursory glance tells you that while it fell victim to arsonists in 2004, it’s continued to be unloved ever since. Indeed in eight and a half years, virtually nothing has been done, save install some scaffolding here and a token tidy-up there.

A pew end lies charred and slowly rotting. The gas cylinder that presumably fuelled the fire lies discarded in the middle of the nave. While nothing of value remains, various chunks of church detritus lie abandoned and uncleared. Visiting by accident at dusk on a full moon, the church couldn’t have screamed  “No One Cares” to me more loudly.

It’s the only church in the country dedicated to St Wandregesilius. My wonderful sheet of paper tells me that he was the Abbot of Fontanelle in Normandy in the 7th century. Wikipedia adds that he’s more commonly known as St Wandrille and that Fontanelle has produced “an unusually large number of saints and the blessed” over the centuries.

The church lies down a peaceful green lane lined with ash and oak, perhaps a quarter of a mile off the busy Norwich to Bungay Road, not far from Arminghall. Knowing that the church had been a place of pilgrimage in the middle ages I was quite enjoying the sense of stepping in the same footsteps as the pious and the pompous all those centuries ago. …until I re-read the leaflet back home and learnt that

“originally the site was not as lonely as it is now because, until 1800, the main Norwich to Bungay Road ran past the church gate. Its course can still be seen along the western side of the churchyard and down the narrow field with many oak trees.”

Is that still the case? I wasn’t paying attention. But it is a truly ancient setting. There could well have been a church here in Saxon times. Most of what we see now dates to a Victorian restoration, but the tower goes back to the 14th century. The pilgrims venerated a statue which was destroyed in 1538 as part of the iconoclasm of the Reformation.

And so to the more recent iconoclasm. The reason I even picked up the sheet of paper in the first place was that I’ve sort-of had St Wandregesilius in my sights ever since that date in May 2004. Working for Look East, we got news that the arsonists had struck late one afternoon and I remember trying and failing to find anyone who could pronounce the saint’s name correctly. We bottled it and went for “Bixley Church” then. Can anyone enlighten me now?

* There’s a great drawing of St W in its prime on Picture Norfolk.

Picture Post: Burgh Castle

The Roman walls of Burgh Castle. Still solid after all these years.

Burgh St Peter: A new ferry for the Burgh Bulge

ONCE upon a time ferries were a big deal on the Broads. Most carried just passengers, a few so-called “horse ferries” could carry horses and carts too. Gradually they fell by the wayside so that by the mid-1990s only Reedham Ferry remained. But now there’s a new kid on the block down on the Waveney. Or rather an old kid re-incarnated. An ancient ferry route from Burgh St Peter to Carlton Marshes was reinstated this May – after a 60-odd year interlude if  this newspaper article, has got it right.

At which point even Broads fans can be forgiven for thinking Burgh St Where and Carlton what?  This map might help. (Click on it to bring it up full frame.) We’re talking about the stretch of the Waveney which suddenly rears northwards after a sedate journey east from its source near the Lophams.  As it turns steadily anti-clockwise it leaves a virtual island on its Norfolk bank. Burgh St Peter is the village at the extreme end of that bulge, while Carlton Marshes on the outskirts of Oulton Broad lies directly opposite. It’s the kind of “peninsula” that deserves its own name. The Burgh Bulge perhaps. In fact I’m going to coin that now. The Burgh Bulge, pass it on

Thanks to this new ferry, anyone cycling from the Norwich area to Lowestoft has a third route to consider - the others being on the A146 and via Haddiscoe. But there’s really no contest. Travelling through the Burgh Bulge is just so much quieter, mainly because it really is the road to nowhere. The only problem at the moment is what greets the cyclist on the other side of the river. You’re on a narrow footpath along the bank followed by a track across the marshes. Neither are really suitable for a road bike. Bored, I got on the saddle half way across and then had plenty of time to contemplate the error of my ways as I fixed a puncture two minutes later. Hey ho. 

But hats off  to the Waveney River Centre for investing the time and money in this project. It’s not just weekends or in the summer. It’s a dawn to dusk, seven days a week job, throughout the year. It will only get more popular as the word spreads. Alan was my ferryman. Thank you sir for the ride.

* I paid £2 single, a return is £3. More details here.

Carleton Beck: Abroad thoughts from Home

“Whenever I reach for the boots and binoculars and head out of my door I could go in any direction from the house to find wildlife. Yet something hard-wired in my brain means that the internal compass always trends to the River Yare.” Mark Cocker, Crow Country 2007.

RETURNING home from work in Norwich along the main A146 to Loddon last night, I felt that familiar old tug on the steering wheel: the one pulling me off the main road and inexorably down to the Yare Valley.

Just being on the back road helps you unwind. And then that powerful magnet somehow hauled me out of the car at Claxton and I wandered down to Carleton Beck as a giant moon started to rise in the eastern sky.

We’re lucky enough to go on holiday every summer and I do a version of this every year. I need to make a conscious effort to re-acquaint myself with the sights, the sounds and in particular the smells of marshy old Norfolk. This year we’d been to the Black Forest in Germany where water virtually hurls itself off the steep hillsides, and makes a racket most of the way down. Gradients were everywhere and it really does take a while to re-adjust to these flatlands.

And I do need to consciously re-calibrate. I’m not from Norfolk and occasionally, after a holiday, the lack of that third dimension reminds me of how melancholy I found the landscape when I first pitched up in this corner of England 20-odd years ago. (I still don’t buy “Big Skies” for example. Big skies imply an absence of interesting land to me.) Anyway last night did the job. Colder than the continent of course. Dank and earthy, with the smells of nettles and brambles more pungent for their novelty. Still summer, but with autumn limbering up in the background. The water in Carleton Beck did nothing slowly, but it will make it down to the Yare in the end. Honest.

Do locals need to do this sort of thing every year. Or does it all come a bit more naturally to you guys? And at the risk of leaving you on a complete downer, I’ll close with some wise old words from Cameron Self’s Literary Norfolk website:

“Retreat now into
Old Norfolk: let the sluggish
Waters absolve you.”