Norfolk Corners

Queen's Hills Country Park is situated in the Tud Valley to the west of Costessey which is itself a western suburb of Norwich. It was created at the same time as Queen's Hills housing estate around 15 years ago. The park is roughly delineated by the estate at its north and the River Tud to its south. Over the past year we have all become more familiar with our immediate surroundings than we would ever expected and I have enjoyed discovering how much the park has to offer. The geography of this part of Costessey has been heavily influenced by gravel quarrying. The clatter of gravel travelling through the steel tubes of Longwater Gravel's processing plant on the other side of the Tud valley is familiar enough to have become part of the ambient noise here. When the plant restarted after England's first lockdown in 2020 however, the renewed noise and light came as quite a shock. To the east lie Costessey Pits which have been repurposed as watersports and fishing lakes...

We visited St. Margaret's church in Cley-Next-the-Sea back in November 2020 about half an hour after visiting the sea defences which I wrote about in a previous entry . It is a surprisingly big church for a smallish village and is testament to the financial riches that Cley enjoyed when it functioned as a harbour around the time that the Church was built ( 1320–1340 ). There is a lot to admire about St. Margaret's church and there must be many stories to tell about the building and it's history. On this visit, my attention was drawn to a cluster of gravestones toward the back of the church. As I scanned the inscriptions on the stones, I noticed that six of them had the same surname: "Riches". I mentioned the Riches patch in St. Margaret's graveyard as I chatted to a genealogist (my dad) about our visit to Cley. Based on nothing but the photo that I emailed him, Dad has been able to follow a sometimes misty trail of clues to piece together a hist...