Local Norfolk For Local People

Between the tawdry desolation of the soul that is Great Yarmouth and the faded yet still picturesque Edwardian splendour of Cromer is a twenty mile curve of coastline that the tourists never get to see.
It's OURS!
Fuck off!
Birdwatchers and wildlife documentary teams are tolerated in small doses but everybody else can just leave us alone. We allow Bill Oddie and Bill Bryson in but only because they're cute.
We are inbred and violent and quite heavily armed.
If you're thinking of visiting us, be sure and watch "Deliverance" first so you know what sort of welcome you'll get.

Norfolk is chock full of windmills …
Actually, we're not. We are chock full of windpumps.
There's only one windmill per village, but lots of windpumps to drain the marshes for farming and to try to keep the sea at bay (not too successfully as the next post will reveal).

This is one of my particular favourites. It drains the marshes around that beautiful stretch of reed-girt water, Horsey Mere (not the bit in the photo; that's just a drainage dyke. Horsey Mere is only accessible by boat and I was walking).
A couple of hundred yards off to the right is the North Sea, held back in a somewhat desultory fashion by The Marrams (for which see below).
On a beautiful day like Sunday I was the only person there. Which was so much nicer than finding fucking tourists clambering all over it.
Stay away!
You can look at the pictures but that's your lot!
This is MINE!

A few short miles trudging across marshes and sand dunes brings us to Waxham Great Barn.
This is a gorgeous and all original fifteenth century tithe barn with a magnificent hammer-beam roof - which I will photograph another day as it serves as a community space for the village and the village was showing very little community spirit when I walked up to find it locked. Hey ho.

Norfolk is totally devoid of building stone so any vernacular building not made of gnarly old oak is built from flints picked up off the beach. the gable of the Great Barn has a very common feature of the time: a diaper pattern formed of burnt brick headers.
I'm an architect and this is a very arousing building for me.

The Marrams are our local sea defences. Mile after mile of sand dunes pushed up off our miles of beautiful sandy beaches by the vicious winter storms that howl straight down from the North Pole and we are the first bit of land they hit.

Unfortunately, The Marrams are very long, but very, very thin and tend to get breached.
As you can see, the land behind them is somewhat below high tide level and in 1953 they were breached badly and hundreds of square miles of farmland flooded with salt water.
Thousands of houses were washed away and more than eighty local people died.
Just off the left hand edge of this photo is the old school, now my mate Neil's house. As it's a two-storey building he has to have a bunch of elderly folk from the village filling up his bedrooms every time we get a severe weather warning.
Luckily he's a nice guy.

You can see part of the latest attempt at sea defence on the left of this photo.
They put in several miles of artificial stone reefs. They are invisible at high tide and have the added bonus of creating such great waves that the tiny village of Sea Palling now has a ramshackle international surfing centre.
On Sunday, however, the three inch rollers didn't appear to tempt any boards out.
The sea was a beautiful shade of blue, but - unlike the unseasonal early February tee-shirt weather - was fucking freezing.

Here you can see a typical Norfolk flint cottage on what is our main coast road (no wonder we hate caravanners so much) and a typical Norfolk roadblock.
We are a very horsey county.
That girl is going to get sunburned and it was only the tenth of February.
Weird.

My next stop will be Happisburgh, whose splendid lighthouse you can see here.
The coast of New England is a virtual clone of Norfolk and we have a wealth of yummy lighthouses too, but unfortunately no Edward Hopper to immortalise them for us.

Happisburgh is - in the cussedly perverse way that we have here - pronounced "Hays-bro". That last "o" is pronounced "uh", as in"Duh".
We have a lot of strangely pronounced villages around here. Our Lynn's parents live in one: "Wymondham" (pron: "Wind'um").

Anyhoo, My next couple of posts will document big lumps of Happisburgh falling off a cliff and into the sea.