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Day 15: cycle ride in the locality
Route: 22 miles – Gresham – West Beckham – Bodham
Hill – Baconsthorpe – Plumstead – Itteringham – Blickling – Aylsham – Ingworth
– Erpringham – Alby Hill – Aldborough – Bessingham – Gresham
“Norfolk is not simply a word that describes a county.
‘Norfolk’ describes also a language, a humour and a way of life. Spoken Norfolk
has a stout and uniquely resistant quality and only people born in the county
are able to properly penetrate it and repeat it with their own tongues. Just as
their language, so also the people of Norfolk are tough, resistant and
impenetrable”
Dick Bagnell-Oakley
We are in relatively
flat terrain, mainly lanes with few cars and the cycling is easy. Any ‘hills’
are long, gentle gradients past fields of peas, potatoes, sugar beet and
cabbages; whilst behind them lie fields of wheat and maize and endless ‘big’
skies. Black tipped long eared hares lope up the trenches between the furrows
of abandoned daffodils, their long green stems withered and yellowing. They
drape over the soil, wilted, a coarsely woven yellow-green cloth of decay and
rot. Meanwhile, the winds swirl across the fields, searching their way inland
off the North Sea coast beyond, caressing the tops of cereal crops and causing
daisies and poppies to dance in the midday sunshine.
Our ‘at a
whim’ side diversion up a concrete by-lane gives us another surprise – the
English Heritage site of Baconsthorpe Castle. A delightful gem of a discovery,
a place of tranquillity and peace, with its moat and mere where swans fuss over
their rapidly growing cygnets and the lake fringes are lined with irises, reeds
and darting coots.
At Itteringham,
we call in at the community run village shop and café where we sit outside
sampling home baked Florentines and delicious lattes. Chatting to locals about
the gentrification of their rural villages, we get a glimpse into the changes
this traditional rural area is undergoing. Being from Devon, we are given some latitude,
for are not the problems of two large rural counties similar to each other?
It’s the
arrival of the ‘Porsche, Range Rover and Mercedes brigades’; second home owners
who complain to local farmers about noisy sheep that disturb their night time
slumbers attract particular ire. ‘If they don’t like sheep noise, they shouldn’t
move out of London to country should ee’ is a refrain oft repeated during
our lengthy conversation. The inflation of local house prices beyond what local
young people can afford is another particularly thorny issue. This is an ageing,
native, rural population watching their families torn apart as ‘incomers’ with
different values and desires arrive in their villages and hamlets and their kin
are forced to ‘out-migrate’ in search of jobs and cheaper homes. Many native
locals seem at a loss on what to do or how to stop the transformation of their
rural unique cultural heritage and history.
The writer Kazuo
Ishiguro observed “Because Norfolk is stuck out on the east, on this lump
jutting into the sea, it’s not on the way to anywhere. People going north and
south, they by-pass it all together”
Well, the
covid crisis has changed that. With the move to ‘working from home’, wealthy
Londoners have rather thought Norfolk a nice place to be locked down in! Demand
for second homes has increased exponentially, prices have risen and locals are no
longer able to buy and continue to live in the villages they grew up in. We see
it in all the modifications and upgrades being made by local builders to so
many hamlet cottages and farm houses. It is a sad but familiar tale for us,
coming from the Devon/Cornwall border.
The
delightful town of Aylsham, a traditional market town beside the river Bure
provides us with another stopping off point and a restorative quick wonder
around an eclectic range of small shops selling local produce and wares. A
traditional market square and Jacobean Hall surrounded by 17th and 18th
century houses; Aylsham is the result of a prosperous cloth trade, the town
famous for its linen as far back as the 1300’s. It is also the northern
terminus of the narrow-gauge Bure Valley Railway which runs down to Wroxham at
the heart of the broads. And to my great delight/disappointment, it is home to
the Altair Telescopes, an internet seller of all things astronomical. Sadly
(for me, but not for Maggie), the shop displays a ‘closed’ sign and a note to
customers that all trade during the pandemic is now carried out on line. I can
only peer through the windows and admire all the telescopes on offer; all those
neatly stacked brown boxes on shelves behind the counter, what delights do they
hold? Dew band heaters, CLS filters, eyepieces and Barlow lenses, Bahtinov
masks and air-cooled little astrophotography cameras? Such goodies for
astrophotography geeks. It is a low blow for sure.
Tourist
information about Aylsham can be found here http://www.norfolktouristinformation.com/norfolk-tourist-information/detail.php?siteid=146
The website
for the Bure Valley Railway is https://www.bvrw.co.uk/
Heading back
to Gresham we come upon the large village green of Aldborough which lightens my
mood no end. The stunning village pond provides a great picnic stop where we
are entertained by the antics of a moorhen family who scurry about trying to
keep account of their brood; young chicks walking on wobbly legs across broad
lily pads, who dive in between the reeds playing hide and seek with their
parents. Rural tranquillity at its best.
Despite the
gentrification of outlying rural communities, Kazuo Ishiguro is right, Norfolk
is indeed “The lost corner of England”.
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