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Oct. 11th, 2008 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanAs regular readers will be aware, I spend an inordinate amount of my time of trains, and am generally a promotor of the much-maligned system. Just occaionally, however, it conspires to make me want to kick one of the bloody things off their tracks. Please feel free to ignore the next paragraph...
My original plans for today were destroyed by the one key link in the chain - the 8:48 train to Kings Lynn - being cancelled. A hasty rethink, using a dense carpeting of OS maps and the Traveline and National Rail sites, ensued, leaving me with an alternative scheme involving wandering around Suffolk. Well, the cut title should suggest how successful that was.
I got to the station in reasonable time to get a ticket, and found only one ticket window open, and a queue snaking around the miniscule ticket hall. My connection at Norwich depending on catching a certain train, and my rover ticket not available from the machine, I fulminated in the queue for a while, got to four minutes before train due to leave, and gave up, getting a return to Norwich from the machine (because, as we all know, You Must Get A Ticket Before You Board The Train). The return was 50p less than the rover ticket, which covered the whole of East Anglia. Once on the train, I discovered there was a conductor selling tickets, but he couldn't exchange my ticket now I had bought it. And once I got to Norwich, I was told the same thing, because the ticket was used. So basically I got penalised for being a good boy and buying a ticket before boarding the train. Grrrr...
Digression - overheard between two teenagers on the train, nearing Norwich:
"Yeah - it was quite funny. On the train, the Norwich Boys come up, and he gave them the money, they said that wasn't no good. Then someone chinned him. He chinned a few of them. It was ... quite funny"
No comment.
Having given up on the original plan for the day, I instead headed into downtown Norwich, remembering another walk I had intended to do, and went in search of a bus. Needless to say, the next bus to my intended start-point of Cawston was two hours away - having had enough, I instead boarded a bus to Aylsham (about four miles from Cawston), must to the consternation of the elderly gent who had been very kindly explaining the myriad complexities of the buses (there are a lot of buses go through Norwich), and couldn't understand why I'd get on a bus which wasn't going where I'd said I wanted to go. Let's just say my feet were ready to get going, and they seemed the only reliable means of motion available to me. So I started from Aylsham.
Aylsham is one of Norfolk's seemingly endless collection of small to medium-sized market towns. These range from the genuinely pretty (Diss, Wymondham), through the uninspiring but pleasant (Aylsham, Swaffham), to the downright tedious (Attleborough). Aylsham is one of the ones I have a soft spot for - there isn't a lot there, but it has a nicely-proportioned market square, some interesting back streets, and a pleasantly old-fasioned air. The town didn't delay me long, because the main aim of the day was to walk some country lanes, and the area west of Aylsham looked to have some promising ones.
I wasn't disappointed. There is a moment in walking along a back-road in deep rural countryside where you realise everything has come together - nice views, birdsong, a gently rolling road before you, and most of all no cars. The best such I ever did was walking from the Queen's Head in Icklesham back to Winchelsea on a spring evening last year, but there have been some good ones in Norfolk, and this was a prime example. To say I stayed off the main roads is putting it very mildly - in the whole walk, I don't think I did more than cross a couple of numbered B-roads. I like to stick to the yellow bits on the OS 1:50,000 maps, and the thinner the line, the better I like it. My route took me through Abel Heath, Oulton, Southgates (none of which could even be classed as hamlets), and an awful lot of fields. At one point I found myself at a crossroads, sitting on a little triangle of grass, leaning against the road-sign. I was offered a choice of Salle, Heydon, Cawston, and Corpusty (the last of these isn't a skin disease, though it probably should be). I was a long way from the nearest Happy Eater. I sat with the sun on my face, my shadow and that of the roadsign looking like an advert for something, and knew I was on my way to that most fabulous of destinations, Nowhere In Particular. Like the Waco Kid, I've always wanted to go there...
Actually, where I was going was Salle. Now, the map of Salle looks like this. It boasts that it won the Best-Kept Village In Norfolk Award in 1999, in the "Under 500 Inhabitants" category. So why on earth would I walk about seven miles to go there? Well, because of this
St Peter and St Paul Church, Salle (pronounced Saul), is recognised as perhaps the finest country church in Norfolk, and therefore by extension one of the very best in the UK. I had wanted to visit it for some years, and never quite got round to it, not least because it doesn't lend itself to public transport visiting. But by gum, it's worth the walk. It has everything you could ask for in a country church - an angel roof, medieval misericords, a beautiful tower, and tombs from the last 500 years. It even has recognisable remains of a pre-Reformation painted rood-screen, and there aren't many of those around. The only thing it doesn't have a lot of is stained glass, but the large, clear-glass windows mean the place is flooded with light on a sunny day. Everything about Salle is right, and comes together perfectly, into the archetype of the big, prosperous country church. I don't know whether Salle used to be bigger than it is now - presumably so, because even the great wool-church of Worstead has some village attached to it still, whereas Salle has none - but the church is simply splendid. I had it to myself mostly (other than a few flies, hugely magnified in the enormous space), before being joined by a tremendously well-spoken gentleman (most visitors to country churches are, I fear), with whom I swapped a few church recommendations and thoughts.
Salle lacking anything like a pub ... or indeed anything much at all ... I found another forgotten byway between hedgerows, down toward Reepham, which is one of twin large villages west of Aylsham (the other one being Cawston). In fact, Reepham considers itself to be a town, having a Town Hall and everything, but it is a bijou town indeed, and there were few if any people about when I visited. Still, it was rather pretty - a small-scale reproduction of Aylsham, in fact - and anywhere with a lane called Pudding Pie Alley is to be applauded. I had a bag of crisps and a bottle of Irn Bru to revive my sinews, and tried to decide what to do next, as the next (and indeed final) bus wasn't due for an hour and a half.
What I in fact did was to visit the next village along, which was the boyhood home of a man who is a god to many of us - Stephan Fry, sometime native of Booton. In fact, Booton hardly exists - it is the odd house, and a hall, straggling between Reepham and Cawston. By the time I had got into it, I had decided I had the stamina to walk to Cawston, another couple of miles, and this proved a good guess, because it allowed me to spy one of Norfolk's strangest buildings - St Michael's Church. If the church at Salle is one of Norfolk's most magnificent, then this one is surely among its most ridiculous. To come across the twin towers and the endless finials, crockets and other assorted twiddly bits across the fields is quite a shock to the system. The church was designed, financed and built by the Reverend Whitwell Elwin, a proper Victorian pious nutcase, and is a marvellous example of what happens when you let a fan of the Gothic Revival style Go Wild in the Country. It is a Victorian Gothic fantasy building just as much as St Pancras or the Liver Building, and since I love both of those, it is not susprising that I love this too, barking though it is. The interior is actually relatively restrained, except for the angel roof, whose angels are far from the delicate and diaphonous figures of our imaginations, looking instead as if they could be the Back Line for the Celestial Ruugby Union squad.
From that arresting spectacle, it was full, if knackered, steam on for Cawston, passing on the corner the house where young Master Fry spend his boyhood (I recognised it from the picture in Moab Is My Washpot, since you ask - blue plaques haven't made it to rural Norfolk yet). From there it was one last pull up to Cawston, which is about the same size as Reepham, but lacks any central focus that I could see. It does however have a fine church, needless to say, and though I was running out of time, I had a swift look round. What most caught my eye was a memorial to the old tradition of Plough Monday, during which the plough would be decorated, dragged from the pub, and blessed in the church in the hopes of a good harvest. This would, naturally, be followed by a piss-up. The church contained a plough, a pub sign (donated when the Plough Inn closed its doors in 1950), and a board containing the following rhyme:
"God spede the plow
And send us ale corn enow
Our purpose for to mak
At crow of cok of the plowgate of Sygate
Be mery and glade
Wat Good ale this work mad"
No prizes for guessing which Transatlantic visitor to these pages such a exhortation to the Almighty to send good beer reminded me of...
The bus showed up dead on time, and carried me via various diverting villages (Stratton Strawless is such a good name), and Godawful suburbs, into Norwich. Since a few of the many secondhand CD shops were still open, I decided to get off at Anglia Square and have a poke around. Unfortunately, Anglia Square is the counterweight to the great beauty of the rest of the city centre - it is an urban wilderness that would have Ainsley Harriott reaching for the Prozac within minutes. Still, it is near the cathedral, and to walk through the precincts of Norwich cathedral of a clear evening is a joy - I went to visit my favourite Green Man, and had a wander along the river back to the station.
The trains, unfortunately, hadn't forgiven or forgotten me, and had one last trick up their collective sleeve, which was to cancel the 17:57 to Nottingham, leaving me with a darkling hour to kill. After the usual internalised bellow of rage, I assumed a patient air, and decided to take my leisure at my favourite pub in Norwich, The Adam and Eve. This is a seriously historic, and very pleasant place - it's about the fourth pub one passes on the walk from the station, but worth the wait. An Aspall's and a bite to eat later, I was ready to face the station again, and hopefully a train home. Norwich station can get pretty feral of a Saturday night - because it is The Big City for such a wide catchment area, each train to come in disgorges (or vomits forth, if you prefer) a stream of howling creatures in search of alcohol and bodily fluids of one persuasion or another. It can be a bit edgy. Thankfully the 18:57 was fairly quiet (which is more than can be said for the 18:40, I suspect - even from the people I saw hurrying onto it, I suspect it was bedlam), and most of the more extreme examples of what I (for reasons too tedious to go into) think of as Thetford Gothic were elsewhere. By the time I got home I was ready for just about nothing - I reckon I must ahve walked the best part of 15 miles across the day - but glad to have experienced a flash of this late and welcome Indian summer, in the deeper, stranger corners of this green and often pleasant land.
My original plans for today were destroyed by the one key link in the chain - the 8:48 train to Kings Lynn - being cancelled. A hasty rethink, using a dense carpeting of OS maps and the Traveline and National Rail sites, ensued, leaving me with an alternative scheme involving wandering around Suffolk. Well, the cut title should suggest how successful that was.
I got to the station in reasonable time to get a ticket, and found only one ticket window open, and a queue snaking around the miniscule ticket hall. My connection at Norwich depending on catching a certain train, and my rover ticket not available from the machine, I fulminated in the queue for a while, got to four minutes before train due to leave, and gave up, getting a return to Norwich from the machine (because, as we all know, You Must Get A Ticket Before You Board The Train). The return was 50p less than the rover ticket, which covered the whole of East Anglia. Once on the train, I discovered there was a conductor selling tickets, but he couldn't exchange my ticket now I had bought it. And once I got to Norwich, I was told the same thing, because the ticket was used. So basically I got penalised for being a good boy and buying a ticket before boarding the train. Grrrr...
Digression - overheard between two teenagers on the train, nearing Norwich:
"Yeah - it was quite funny. On the train, the Norwich Boys come up, and he gave them the money, they said that wasn't no good. Then someone chinned him. He chinned a few of them. It was ... quite funny"
No comment.
Having given up on the original plan for the day, I instead headed into downtown Norwich, remembering another walk I had intended to do, and went in search of a bus. Needless to say, the next bus to my intended start-point of Cawston was two hours away - having had enough, I instead boarded a bus to Aylsham (about four miles from Cawston), must to the consternation of the elderly gent who had been very kindly explaining the myriad complexities of the buses (there are a lot of buses go through Norwich), and couldn't understand why I'd get on a bus which wasn't going where I'd said I wanted to go. Let's just say my feet were ready to get going, and they seemed the only reliable means of motion available to me. So I started from Aylsham.
Aylsham is one of Norfolk's seemingly endless collection of small to medium-sized market towns. These range from the genuinely pretty (Diss, Wymondham), through the uninspiring but pleasant (Aylsham, Swaffham), to the downright tedious (Attleborough). Aylsham is one of the ones I have a soft spot for - there isn't a lot there, but it has a nicely-proportioned market square, some interesting back streets, and a pleasantly old-fasioned air. The town didn't delay me long, because the main aim of the day was to walk some country lanes, and the area west of Aylsham looked to have some promising ones.
I wasn't disappointed. There is a moment in walking along a back-road in deep rural countryside where you realise everything has come together - nice views, birdsong, a gently rolling road before you, and most of all no cars. The best such I ever did was walking from the Queen's Head in Icklesham back to Winchelsea on a spring evening last year, but there have been some good ones in Norfolk, and this was a prime example. To say I stayed off the main roads is putting it very mildly - in the whole walk, I don't think I did more than cross a couple of numbered B-roads. I like to stick to the yellow bits on the OS 1:50,000 maps, and the thinner the line, the better I like it. My route took me through Abel Heath, Oulton, Southgates (none of which could even be classed as hamlets), and an awful lot of fields. At one point I found myself at a crossroads, sitting on a little triangle of grass, leaning against the road-sign. I was offered a choice of Salle, Heydon, Cawston, and Corpusty (the last of these isn't a skin disease, though it probably should be). I was a long way from the nearest Happy Eater. I sat with the sun on my face, my shadow and that of the roadsign looking like an advert for something, and knew I was on my way to that most fabulous of destinations, Nowhere In Particular. Like the Waco Kid, I've always wanted to go there...
Actually, where I was going was Salle. Now, the map of Salle looks like this. It boasts that it won the Best-Kept Village In Norfolk Award in 1999, in the "Under 500 Inhabitants" category. So why on earth would I walk about seven miles to go there? Well, because of this
St Peter and St Paul Church, Salle (pronounced Saul), is recognised as perhaps the finest country church in Norfolk, and therefore by extension one of the very best in the UK. I had wanted to visit it for some years, and never quite got round to it, not least because it doesn't lend itself to public transport visiting. But by gum, it's worth the walk. It has everything you could ask for in a country church - an angel roof, medieval misericords, a beautiful tower, and tombs from the last 500 years. It even has recognisable remains of a pre-Reformation painted rood-screen, and there aren't many of those around. The only thing it doesn't have a lot of is stained glass, but the large, clear-glass windows mean the place is flooded with light on a sunny day. Everything about Salle is right, and comes together perfectly, into the archetype of the big, prosperous country church. I don't know whether Salle used to be bigger than it is now - presumably so, because even the great wool-church of Worstead has some village attached to it still, whereas Salle has none - but the church is simply splendid. I had it to myself mostly (other than a few flies, hugely magnified in the enormous space), before being joined by a tremendously well-spoken gentleman (most visitors to country churches are, I fear), with whom I swapped a few church recommendations and thoughts.
Salle lacking anything like a pub ... or indeed anything much at all ... I found another forgotten byway between hedgerows, down toward Reepham, which is one of twin large villages west of Aylsham (the other one being Cawston). In fact, Reepham considers itself to be a town, having a Town Hall and everything, but it is a bijou town indeed, and there were few if any people about when I visited. Still, it was rather pretty - a small-scale reproduction of Aylsham, in fact - and anywhere with a lane called Pudding Pie Alley is to be applauded. I had a bag of crisps and a bottle of Irn Bru to revive my sinews, and tried to decide what to do next, as the next (and indeed final) bus wasn't due for an hour and a half.
What I in fact did was to visit the next village along, which was the boyhood home of a man who is a god to many of us - Stephan Fry, sometime native of Booton. In fact, Booton hardly exists - it is the odd house, and a hall, straggling between Reepham and Cawston. By the time I had got into it, I had decided I had the stamina to walk to Cawston, another couple of miles, and this proved a good guess, because it allowed me to spy one of Norfolk's strangest buildings - St Michael's Church. If the church at Salle is one of Norfolk's most magnificent, then this one is surely among its most ridiculous. To come across the twin towers and the endless finials, crockets and other assorted twiddly bits across the fields is quite a shock to the system. The church was designed, financed and built by the Reverend Whitwell Elwin, a proper Victorian pious nutcase, and is a marvellous example of what happens when you let a fan of the Gothic Revival style Go Wild in the Country. It is a Victorian Gothic fantasy building just as much as St Pancras or the Liver Building, and since I love both of those, it is not susprising that I love this too, barking though it is. The interior is actually relatively restrained, except for the angel roof, whose angels are far from the delicate and diaphonous figures of our imaginations, looking instead as if they could be the Back Line for the Celestial Ruugby Union squad.
From that arresting spectacle, it was full, if knackered, steam on for Cawston, passing on the corner the house where young Master Fry spend his boyhood (I recognised it from the picture in Moab Is My Washpot, since you ask - blue plaques haven't made it to rural Norfolk yet). From there it was one last pull up to Cawston, which is about the same size as Reepham, but lacks any central focus that I could see. It does however have a fine church, needless to say, and though I was running out of time, I had a swift look round. What most caught my eye was a memorial to the old tradition of Plough Monday, during which the plough would be decorated, dragged from the pub, and blessed in the church in the hopes of a good harvest. This would, naturally, be followed by a piss-up. The church contained a plough, a pub sign (donated when the Plough Inn closed its doors in 1950), and a board containing the following rhyme:
"God spede the plow
And send us ale corn enow
Our purpose for to mak
At crow of cok of the plowgate of Sygate
Be mery and glade
Wat Good ale this work mad"
No prizes for guessing which Transatlantic visitor to these pages such a exhortation to the Almighty to send good beer reminded me of...
The bus showed up dead on time, and carried me via various diverting villages (Stratton Strawless is such a good name), and Godawful suburbs, into Norwich. Since a few of the many secondhand CD shops were still open, I decided to get off at Anglia Square and have a poke around. Unfortunately, Anglia Square is the counterweight to the great beauty of the rest of the city centre - it is an urban wilderness that would have Ainsley Harriott reaching for the Prozac within minutes. Still, it is near the cathedral, and to walk through the precincts of Norwich cathedral of a clear evening is a joy - I went to visit my favourite Green Man, and had a wander along the river back to the station.
The trains, unfortunately, hadn't forgiven or forgotten me, and had one last trick up their collective sleeve, which was to cancel the 17:57 to Nottingham, leaving me with a darkling hour to kill. After the usual internalised bellow of rage, I assumed a patient air, and decided to take my leisure at my favourite pub in Norwich, The Adam and Eve. This is a seriously historic, and very pleasant place - it's about the fourth pub one passes on the walk from the station, but worth the wait. An Aspall's and a bite to eat later, I was ready to face the station again, and hopefully a train home. Norwich station can get pretty feral of a Saturday night - because it is The Big City for such a wide catchment area, each train to come in disgorges (or vomits forth, if you prefer) a stream of howling creatures in search of alcohol and bodily fluids of one persuasion or another. It can be a bit edgy. Thankfully the 18:57 was fairly quiet (which is more than can be said for the 18:40, I suspect - even from the people I saw hurrying onto it, I suspect it was bedlam), and most of the more extreme examples of what I (for reasons too tedious to go into) think of as Thetford Gothic were elsewhere. By the time I got home I was ready for just about nothing - I reckon I must ahve walked the best part of 15 miles across the day - but glad to have experienced a flash of this late and welcome Indian summer, in the deeper, stranger corners of this green and often pleasant land.
