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...

I found this intriguing brass plaque on the side of an old forge building in Bowthorpe when I went to photograph the community garden there. Like Pablo Fanque before him, I had seen his name in various places but I hadn't really registered it. This stern, bald figure commanded attention though. As a general rule I think its worth paying close attention to anyone who is wielding a huge scythe. Nearby there is another plaque with a short biography of St. Walstan. I was interested to note that he was related to King Edmund . It goes on to describe how he forsook his privilege to devote his life to Christ and how, through his prayer, he performed miracles to heal farm animals around Taverham. Photo: lwr There are some more details on Wikipedia describing how St. Walstan's miracles led to him becoming the patron saint of agricultural workers. This would have made him a pretty big deal in East Anglia in the 10th century. The page includes another portrait of St. Walstan...

We were walking back from the Lifeboat house at the end of Cromer pier earlier this year when something on the cliff wall caught my eye. It looked like a slightly stunted arched window or even a doorway through the flints. Where could it lead? We wandered along the beach towards the lifeboat museum and I forgot about it. I kicked myself when I remembered the arch the next day. I looked online to see if I could find out anything about it but to no avail. The window in the cliff came back to me more recently as I considered what might count as a curious corner for a blog. Regular readers will know that I settled on quite a broad definition that could be fairly described as 'whatever I happen upon' but I resolved to return to Cromer to investigate soon. It was Halloween the next time we were there and the clouds blackened accordingly. The last time we had walked the promenade, huge waves were crashing against the thick, curved concrete walls, showering onlookers with ...

A gallery of photos that I took on a sunlit autumn afternoon following  a walk that we downloaded from Norfolk County Council 's Norfolk Trails . We stumbled upon a local fairy settlement. I hoped that they did't mind me sharing some photos of their architecture. One of them made it clear that he did. Some bees had been playing noughts and crosses while they waited for flowers to start blooming again. There were still some golden leaves clinging on but the carpet of brown foliage underfoot was becoming thicker. Without their leaves, the trees' characters were revealed. As our hemisphere starts to tilt away from the sun and our days get shorter, there is less time for the leaves to photosynthesise and it becomes uneconomical for deciduous trees to devote their energy to leaf growth. Instead they turn their energy to fruiting in early autumn and conservation as the weather starts to turn colder. ...