Norfolkiana

Some photos from a weekend spent back in my home town, King's Lynn, in Norfolk (that's the sticky-out bit on the east coast, for those whose geography is not too hot). I bang on about how awful it is, but there are some good things there:


He's one of the professional fishermen, who make their living from mostly inshore shell fisheries -- but it's a declining industry (as you can see in the close-up of this abandoned boat, which was behind his shoulder):


He was about to set sail (or, rather, set diesel) in the green and rather more seaworthy boat to the left of this picture:


The Fisher Fleet is one of the three tidal inlets around which Lynn was built -- although most of it has now been built over, the inland end of the creek houses some of the more amateurish boats, reached over their incredibly rickety-looking wooden jetties:


But the proper working boats have a purposefulness about them -- hard-wearing, sturdy craft ...


... which they need to be to cope with the storms that blast from the Arctic down the North Sea and into The Wash, the vast tidal basin into which the River Great Ouse empties:


This is a bleak, liminal place, huge swathes of salt marsh lining the banks of the Ouse, forming a flood plain before the distant sea wall:


It's possible to walk along the banks of the estuary for some distance, underneath wires carried by a pair of vast pylons: the National Grid crosses the river here, at a height to enable shipping to pass easily underneath:


This is a land of estuarine mud, fertile silt washed down from the Midlands:


I love the horizontals: Rothko famously used the desert landscapes of vast skies and vast flatlands to inspire his supposedly abstract works, and the same sense of overwhelming horizontals exists in this watery landscape:


Let's leave the river for a bit. Lynn for a long time was an engineering town as well as a fishing town. One of the bigger companies was Savages -- what a great name for a Victorian engineer.


Savages were one of the country's main manufacturers of fairground rides and equipment. Can you imagine what a twenty-first century branding consultant would make of that?


The town of Lynn was traditionally made up of yards -- self-contained alleys around which were grouped multi-occupancy houses mixed in with small businesses. Most of these yards have been swept away in modernisations schemes, but one or two remain, like that, above, although there the back wall (closest to us) has been revealed.


St Nicholas' Chapel served the fishing communities at the northern end of the town. Unfortunately the wide angle lens necessary to fit everything in has made the glorious spire look stumpy. Take my word for it: it's glorious.


And it needs to be, since Norfolk is a place of vast, open skies.


And, occasionally, punctuating these skies, there are vast country palaces like this one, Blickling Hall:


This magnificent Jacobean pile is delightful, approached down a drive where a pair of rows of cottages draws the eye to that glorious facade.

It's actually a place of vistas, the generous gardens riddled with them:


But the gardens have a domestic scale, too, with rich borders full of traditional English garden flowers (that is to say, plants imported from all over the world):


It's the details at Blickling that make it -- like these lovely joined chimney stacks:


Inside things are as luxurious as you would expect, although there's a particularly good library -- including this delightful illustration by pioneering microscopist Robert Hooke:


And there are reminders of the building's antiquity everywhere:


Inside, the National Trust has mixed in contemporary works which reflect and challenge -- like these Elizabethan/Modern paintings of characters from Shakespeare:


All beautifully hung in a rather glorious library:


Not so far from Blickling is a very different sort of historical monument:


That was the main water tank at Melton Constable, the engineering works of the Midland & Great Northern Railway, and the point where two branches left the M&GN's main trunk line.


Today, half a century after the railway was dismantled, the vast engineering buildings have mostly been reused.


But throughout this town -- the "Crewe of North Norfolk" -- there are reminders that it was the railway that made it, turning it from a village of around 100 people into a town of ten times that number.


And in a county where the vernacular is either flint or carrstone, it's strange to find row upon row of neat Victorian terraces all in Midland brick -- housing built by the railway for its workers, using bricks brought in from Peterborough at the other end of the M&GN's network.


The paternalistic employers have left all sorts of reminders of their existence, although the Railway Institute built to enable their workers to improve themselves has now become the improbably named "Melton Constable Country Club".


It's that massive water tank that dominates, though, each panel marked with "M&GN" at its centre.


Let's go back west, to Reffley Wood, near King's Lynn (the location of the viper about which I posted below):


But even here you can't escape the M&GN -- the telegraph poles in the photo, below, follow the line of an old M&GN branch, from Bawsey to Lynn.


The branch connected with the Great Eastern Railway's Hunstanton-Lynn line and, thence, to the GER's terminus at Lynn. But the rents charged to the M&GN for using the GER's line were so extortionate that the company built a by-pass railway, with their own station at South Lynn, and abandoned this route at the end of the nineteenth century. The telegraph poles remain, a fossilised reminder of the route that's survived more than a hundred years.


That was the River Gay, gratuitously included so you can snigger at the name, but also because I love the colour of the sky reflected in the water.


And that was the ruin of St James' church, which was at the centre of the abandoned Medieval village of Bawsey -- known locally as Bawsey Ruin.


And let's finish there, with the sunshine pouring through the trees of Reffley Wood.

God, it almost sounds like I enjoyed my weekend stuck in that Hell-hole.