Norwich Underground

Norwich’s network of underground passageways is the stuff of legends. Many of them may be the work of over-active imaginations but others undoubtedly do exist as relics of the city’s medieval glory days when a little subterranean expediency came in handy in times of religious persecution or civil war. Of course, even those that exist solely in folk memory still make for a good story.

The city’s bedrock is pitted with less glamorous tunnels too. Chalk and flint mining was a Norwich tradition for centuries and both materials were necessary for building the extensive city’s walls and numerous churches of what was England’s second largest city in the medieval period. As a result, certain areas of the city have long been synonymous with subsidence problems. A reminder of this came to the fore in 1988 when a double-decker bus was unexpectedly swallowed-up by the earth on Earlham Road close to the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St John the Baptist. Thankfully no-one was hurt. This bizarre event made for some entertaining postcards and even gave the opportunity for the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s to promote one of its products using a photograph of the unfortunate bus alongside the slogan, ‘Nothing fills a hole like a Double Decker’.

Walking recently in a formerly unexplored corner of a familiar haunt at the city outskirts I stumbled upon an entrance to this chalky underworld. Long sealed-up with steel to deter would-be intruders, this one had been recently prised open – by shadowy urban explorers, no doubt, keen on charting this unmapped terrain. Resistance was futile – there was no way to turn down such a serendipitous opportunity.

Just a few metres beyond the entrance the absolute darkness is intimidating – the light of torches too feeble to identify much more than where the tunnel floor is and highlight spray-painted ciphers marking dead ends and potential exit routes. The photos taken here with flash were made by simply pointing and hoping for the best: a strange turn of events in which the results reveal detail unseen by dim yellow torchlight at the time of their taking.

A troglodyte world such as this is a starkly alien environment that can bring out the most atavistic of fears. Past underground visits have been to well-lit caverns filled with phantasmagorical stalactites and stalagmites, or tropical caves in south-east Asia populated by strange blind fish and albino insects — beautiful unthreatening spaces. My only previous mine experience was a terrible, yet fascinating, place on the other side of the world: a Bolivian silver mine at over 4,000 metres altitude at Cerro Rico (‘rich hill’) near Potosí, where visitors are expected to bring along gifts of Coca-Cola, bags of coca leaves and sticks of dynamite – the necessities of a Bolivian mining life. The miners in turn offer their own gifts to El Tío (‘The Uncle’), the spirit of the underworld – a pact with the Devil that permits them to scratch a dangerous living from the earth for their short tough lives. Since this visit I have always afforded miners the greatest respect.

It might seem odd that a short excursion beneath the ground just a mile or so from home can feel almost as alien an experience as a visit to a Bolivian silver mine – even without a cheek-wad of coca leaves and the necessity of appeasing ‘The Uncle’. There again, the juxtaposition of a jarring new experience in a wholly familiar setting is always going to be disturbing.

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Walking the Edge

The latest issue of Geographical magazine has a feature by Alastair Humphreys on walking around London following a route as close to the M25 orbital as possible. The focus here – other than the testing of outdoor clothing and equipment – seems to be that of ‘micro-adventures’ in one’s local area: a worthy notion in this information-bloated age where, if truth be told, there are few exotic places left to explore. The adventurers of yore usually had an ulterior motive anyway – empire carving, resource procurement, trade – and so latter-day explorers, unsponsored by king and country (and usually publishers) and wishing to find something new, have to look instead at the finer detail, examine the way countries have changed, focus on the small print of ‘place’.

The writer Iain Sinclair has already written about the M25 at length in his book London Orbital where, instead of sleeping in a bivvy bag in green belt fields (and tweeting about it) as Humphreys has done, the author completed the circuit by way of day-long excursions from his Hackney home in the company of a handful of friends. Sinclair’s clockwise plod reveals a twilight zone where megalopolis begins to morph into leafy shires. Most revealingly, he identifies a ring of vanished mental hospitals and institutions that trace the course of the future motorway with uncanny accuracy. Like plague pits located beyond medieval city walls, it appears as if it was decided in Victorian times that illness – especially the mental kind – had to be kept at arm’s length and well beyond the city’s grasp lest it infect the metropolitan populace. The distance necessary for this physical and spiritual separation seems to coincide almost exactly with that of London’s orbital racetrack.

Turning to a more rural setting, here in East Anglia both Norfolk and Suffolk may be circumambulated (more or less – let us not quibble about precise boundaries) by following a series of long-distance footpaths. In Norfolk, begin with the Angles Way in Great Yarmouth, follow it along the Waveney Valley almost as far as Thetford in Breckland and then take the  Iceni Way along the River Great Ouse and across the Fens north to Hunstanton where the Norfolk Coast Path can be picked up to continue east. At Cromer, the meandering Weaver’s Way can then be followed through the Broads to arrive back at Yarmouth. In Suffolk, the Suffolk Coast Path can be walked from Lowestoft to Felixstowe before continuing around the Suffolk estuaries by means of the Stour and Orwell Walk to Cattawade. Here, the county boundary may be traced west to by means of the Stour Valley Path, straying occasionally into Essex and Cambridgeshire, as far as Sudbury before continuing to Bury St Edmunds along the St Edmund Way and Icknield Way path to Breckland  from where the Angle’s Way completes the circuit back to the Suffolk Coast.

Last year I had a notion that it might be interesting to split the Norfolk boundary circuit into four seasonal portions, four lengths of the county rectangle that would be walked around each of the year’s cardinal points: the Angle’s Way in mid winter; the Iceni Way in spring and so on, completing the circuit to arrive back at Great Yarmouth around the autumnal equinox. Starting out with good intentions, I walked the length of the Angles Way in late December 2009 and early January 2010. Plans for setting out on the next section, the Iceni Way, were abandoned however – or, rather, put on hold – when a commission to write a guide for Cicerone Press on the three long-distance walks within the Suffolk Coast & Heaths AONB turned my attention to trails a little further southeast. My forthcoming guide Suffolk Coast and Heaths Walks: Three Long-distance Routes in the AONB will be published in November this year.

Time and Tide

Great Yarmouth’s excellent Time and Tide Museum continues to fly the flag for that town’s half-forgotten herring industry. Located near the old town walls just off South Quay in a former herring smokehouse, the museum informs and charms in equal measure. With mock-ups of 19th century ‘rows’ – the tiny terraced back-to-backs that once housed Yarmouth’s men and women of the sea – and with plenty of newsreel and black and white photographs of whiskery sailors and itinerant Scottish fishergirls it transports the visitor back to a time when the herring was king and Yarmouth served as his palace: ‘the fishiest town in all England’ as Charles Dickens once observed. Such erstwhile fishiness is tangible: the very walls of the museum are still redolent of smoked fish — rich, evocative, appetising. Once, the whole of South Quay must have smelled like this.

Yarmouth has had to reinvent itself several times over the past couple of centuries: prosperous periods as a boatbuilding hub, fishing port, herring processing centre and seaside resort have come and gone, overlapping one another as palimpsests of industry. These days, although a vestige of low-expectation tourism still clings on, it is more an ambience of low-rent charity shops, Portuguese cafes and boarded-up businesses that characterises this urbanised sand spit on England’s easternmost shore.

The Time and Tide Museum is struggling a little despite numerous plaudits since its establishment that include becoming a Gulbenkian Prize Museum of the Year finalist in 2005. Recently the Silver Darlings cafe in the museum courtyard was forced to close through lack of funding – a soft target for funding cuts in this penny-pinching era. The vending machine that has been installed is scant compensation. To Yarmouth’s credit, there was widespread dissent about this. People here are proud and do not like to see the ongoing decline of their town, especially considering that it once held such an elevated position in Britain’s maritime heritage.

Nowhere is this proud heritage better displayed than at the Britannia Monument at The Denes a mile or so south of the museum. The monument was erected in 1819 as a memorial to Admiral Horatio Nelson, Norfolk’s most famous son (give or take Stephen Fry or Delia Smith). Standing 44 metres high, just eight metres short of the Nelson monument in London’s Trafalgar Square, the column appears anachronistic towering above the humdrum low-rises of an industrial estate: a weather-stained monolith to past glory and the red-jacketed hubris of empire. Over less than two centuries, a booming herring trade, bucket and spade holidaymakers and lacklustre industry have all had their place in the sun here beneath Britannia’s unwavering gaze: such has been the drift of Yarmouth’s cultural topography.

But there is an undeniable glory to it too: a thick-set Doric column topped by a pergola framed by six caryatids that in turn supports a figure of Britannia atop a globe inscribed Plamam Qui Meruit Ferat (‘Let him who merits it take the palm’), the motto of Nelson’s coat of arms. All is not quite what it might first appear: you cannot tell from the ground but Britannia and her caryatids are modern fibreglass replacements of the stone originals — if you come here hot-foot from the Time and Tide Museum then you will already have seen the original head of Britannia there. I mentioned hubris; one might assume that Britannia would be facing square-jawed out to sea warning continental upstarts not to mess with the Royal Navy but no, she faces inland — towards northwest Norfolk and Nelson’s birthplace at Burnham Thorpe, some say.

Cromer New Year, 2011

Many of us feel a need to mark the turning of the year in some way other than simply customary overindulgence on the eve of the old year – an outing to some favoured spot on New Year’s Day perhaps? For those of us who live in Norwich, the North Norfolk coast usually fits the bill. It is not just a matter of blowing cobwebs away or walking off the previous night’s hangover, although certainly that may be an element of it, but more a way of welcoming the New Year and bidding farewell to the cultural interregnum that is the week after Christmas. The last week in December may not strictly be a month of Sundays but it can sometimes feel like it.

Christmas and New Year have long been syncretised with ancient rituals that used to mark the winter solstice, the turning point of the year that heralds the long-awaited lengthening of days. The trouble is these days, as with any public holiday, the Christmas break (should that be ©hristmas?) is largely seen as just another retail opportunity to sell you stuff you really don’t need. New Year’s Day seems different though – especially now that the ‘January sales’ tend to begin on Boxing Day – and has the feel of a day with a tad more community spirit than most. It may be cold January but, venturing outdoors, you get the impression that families are more likely to go out for a walk together on this day than any other in the year. Naturally enough, this phenomenon may also have some connection with New Year resolutions that involve fitness, family togetherness and fresh resolve to avoid couch potato blight. Personal New Year favourites tend to be a walk along the shingle bank at Cley-next-the-Sea, a five-mile circuit centred on Horsey that takes in Horsey Mere and a seal-friendly stretch of the northeast Norfolk coast, or the cliff walk between Overstrand and Cromer. This year, we chose the latter: a seaside amble along the beach from Cromer to Overstrand then a return to Cromer by way of the cliff path.

On a dull winter’s day the north Norfolk seascape can appear almost monochromatic. It is necessary to make adjustments in order to fully appreciate its understated, charcoal-sketch beauty. Scandinavians, fully at home with cold northern light, are good at this; Brits, however, our eyes forever enviously half-cocked on the promise of Mediterranean sun, are not so adept. Whatever the time of year, the north Norfolk coast is a liminal landscape: just sea, sky and sand. Head due north from here and there’s nothing but cold dark water until you reach the Arctic pack ice – nothing but notional maritime territories: Humber, Dogger, Forties, Viking. Horizontal layers of grey stratify the landscape: murky water; shining banks of cloud that weigh heavy on the horizon; sand and pebbles in the foreground. Look behind you and the cliffs behind are crumbling: too soft to win the fight in any sea versus land standoff. The aural landscape is hardly brighter: just the usual coastal din of argumentative gulls and overexcited dogs, the swash of waves and the grate of pebbles.

Crunching east along the pebbles, keeping a casual eyen open for the ochre glint of amber (never found), a steely blue jewel  nestled in seaweed reveals itself. The object, a detached lobster tail – or, rather, thorax – is so intensely blue that it seems to suck in light like a tiny dead star fallen to earth. The cerulean richness seems unworldly in this colour-bleached landscape. Separated from carapace and succulent flesh, its isolation renders it all the more precious. Precision-engineered to allow the most delicate of movements, it is a tail designed for swimming, dancing and mating displays, a tail for lobster love.

Returning along the cliffs next to the golf course the path is lined with thickets of sea buckthorn. In other years these have been so weighed down with squishy orange fruit that they dazzle the eye but this winter the berries, following a savagely cold December, are little more than a withered memory, with few to be seen on the bushes, thinned by frost action and hungry birds. Archaeological evidence suggests that sea buckthorn berries once played an important role in man’s diet but the truth is that, while they may be nutritious, they are also unbelievably astringent eaten raw, like bitter acid on the tongue. Freezing and cooking are supposed to reduce their unpalatable quality so we must conclude that Norfolk’s early settlers made some sort of jam out of the fruit.

Since the millennial year, Cromer has staged a New Year firework display that is said to attract at least half the town’s population and the same again from the county beyond. This year, we stayed to watch. By well before the time that darkness fell, it was impossible to find a seat in the Rocket Cafe above the Lifeboat Museum – the perfect viewpoint for the event. Instead, we stood among the crowd by the seawall facing the pier, while others positioned themselves up the steps that lead up to the main promenade. The display, when it finally began after what seemed like a long, cold late-afternoon wait, was a wonderfully explosive affair – a lengthy and varied display that made the annual Lord Mayor’s Procession event in Norwich look like a damp squib in comparison. As the last cracks of pyrotechnic thunder echoed against the sea wall, and the final salvo of rockets stabbed at the sky, I wondered what Cromer’s offshore crabs made of all this unexplained cacophony. Were they all scurrying northwards along the seafloor heading for the relative peace of Dogger Bank?