Well, here is just about all of it, laid out beneath St.James's Hill.
There are some parts of the city, even within ten minutes walk of the mediæval centre, that are kind of weird, untamed hillbilly country, and this is one of them. A maze of public vegetable allotments left over from Victorian civic reforms mingled with odd patches of waste ground and the occasional goat and - on this particular day - a pink dress waving in the breeze.
Norwich was built on chalk hills and most of those have been undermined by diggings in mediæval times, leaving stretches of the hillsides prone to subsidence and the sudden opening up of 20 to 200 foot deep sink holes that can (and do) swallow houses and buses. Some of these areas are parkland, but some - like this one - are places the Victorian social reformers gave over to the poor for growing food and keeping animals. I'm glad that it is too expensive to build safe foundations for buildings here. It's a nice place to wander, backing as it does onto Mousehold, which is a hilly, meandering wonderland of prehistoric woodland and all the better for being right in the middle of a city.
5 comments:
Well, then, my plans have changed. I'll have to live in town.
Have you ever had a chance to see the tunnels? Presumably there's a city official or two who knows how to get into them. All you have to do is make friends with the right people, eh?
Nice pic...wonder who the pink dress belongs to?
Petrea, I'll do a post on the tunnels.
Mum: not me. It's not my size.
That's an interesting, haunting image. It reminds me of some of the scenes painted by Andrew Wyeth.
Oh, gosh, I love Andrew Wyeth, Ms.M.
I first saw his paintings 'in the flesh' at an exhibition in Cambridge when I was a teenager, which also featured his father's work as a book illustrator. I was blown away and have been an avid fan ever since.
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