BOWTHORPE
Until the nineteen seventies Bowthorpe was a quite rural district in the county outside the built up area of Norwich. It had lost its inhabitants after the Reformation, when the church of St Michael that used to serve the village had become a ruin. The roof had collapsed in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and the church was left to decay. It was finally abandoned in around 1790. It lost its round tower long ago, but the nave is still surprisingly well preserved. The residents had already been drawn away to the city, which was adjacent and where employment was more plentiful and remunerative than the farm work in the village on the land adjoining the Yare marshes.
In 1549 the parish played its part in the early stages of Kett’s Rebellion; from Wymondham where the revolt had started the rebels advanced to the outskirts of Norwich. The first night of the gathering was spent camping at Bowthorpe; luckily it was summer, and suitable for spending the night outdoors. The next day was the 10th of July, and that was spent at the adjoining village of Eaton. They crossed the river Wensum at Hellesdon, and after spending Thursday night at Drayton some 16,000 rebels made their way to Mousehold Heath, where the rest of the story played out.
When I lived in Costessey I was a frequent visitor to the newly built Bowthorpe. Not only did my wife and I often go to the shopping centre in Wendene, but for several years I worked out of Bowthorpe, where the Post Office rented a warehouse where letters were sorted for local deliveries including Costessey. The area is divided into three ‘villages’, Clover Hill, Chapel Break and Three Score. It has a population of over 15,000, which puts it on a par with Thorpe Marriott, another development on the outskirts of Norwich. It has schools for junior Pupils and used to have a High School too, but this has since been closed and demolished. There is also at least one cafeteria that and it has a pub in the shopping centre called the Norkie.
The ecumenical Church Centre was built in 1978 as part of Clover Hill. It includes the ruins of ST Michael’s and as well as being used by the main church denominations for services it is also in regular use as a secular meeting place.
JOSEPH MASON
THE BLOG FOR MEMORIES OF EAST ANGLIAN LIFE
ANDREW W. ANDERSON
A. W. Anderson aged 18 with a model of an idea for a stand at the Royal Norfolk Show.
The City of Norwich School pupil, who won the most valuable scholarship ever to have come the way of a boy in the school up to that time, might never have entered for it had he followed his first career choice, which was to join the Merchant Navy. However, his vision did not come up to the strict standards of the Mercantile Marine, he being colour blind. The award he subsequently won from the Leverhulme Trust was worth £400 a year for 5 years. This now equates to a total value of more than £100,000.
This was in the mid 1950s. Andrew’s headmaster, Mr R. W. Jackson, seems to have been quite impressed by his pupil’s achievement. His architectural abilities had won him a highly competitive scholarship at the Architectural Association in London, which entailed a written examination, scrutiny of examples of his work and an interview. This star student, his head informed the readers of the local press, also did well at art, history and mathematics. Despite missing out on the opportunity to pursue a life at sea, Andrew and his brother David were keen sailors. They already possessed a 12 foot sailing dinghy, a Graduate, which they sailed mostly at Blakeney.
The Trust was established under the will of Viscount Leverhulme (William Hesketh Lever), who died in 1925. He had made his money from Sunlight Soap, and the company he founded still bears his name as Unilever. With an annual fund of £50 million, it is among the largest donors in the education and research fields.
It was while he was studying in London that Andrew became involved with printing. Initially it was not letterpress, his introduction to the art was through linocuts and wood-engraving. To further his interest he acquired an Albion press, which had been thrown out by a firm of jobbing printers in Oxford. They had probably used it since it was new about a hundred years before. I remember it when it was set up in the old stable block of Crown Point House, when it was Whitlingham Hospital. There my Aunt Olive – his mother- was Deputy Matron. It was deserted apart from the grooms’ room, which he used as his printing office.
I recall one morning spent at the old stable with Andrew. This must have been before 1960, because I could not at the time ride a bike. I must have been left at WHITLNGHAM by my father on his way to work, because when the time came to go home for dinner at mid-day the only way was as the pillion passenger on Andrew’s Lambretta. Not being able to balance on two wheels, I was afraid I would upset the scooter, but in the event we got home with out incident. It was a scary experience however, and in those days of course helmets were not compulsory, and on motor scooters were seldom used. I certainly didn’t have one. So that was my first bike ride, when I couldn’t ride even a push bike!
JOSEPH MASON
THE BLOG FOR MEMORIES OF EAST ANGLIAN LIFE
BROADLAND BUSINESS PARK TRAIN STATION?
“The proposal to build a new station on the Bittern Line in Norfolk has moved a step closer with the promise of the creation of a committee to examine the case.” For heavens sake how hard is that? This only requires the construction of two platforms; how many committees does it need to look into the case? It is but another indication of the expense and delay that any infrastructure project now involves. If this is what is required for opening one station, what about the reopening a whole railway line? I think the people of Wisbech can forget about the restoration of their rail link with Cambridge, unless Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister. He at least has stressed the urgency of reopening this line, although the prospect of his actually becoming Prime Minister seems remote. If only the closure of stations had been so protracted back in the sixties.
As you can tell, I wrote the above paragraph some years ago in 2016, when Mr Corbyn was still leader of the Labour Party. Things have moved on quite a bit since then, but they are still just talking about providing a railway station for the Broadland Business Park. In six years the project has got precisely nowhere. A hundred and eighty years ago it took only two years to build the entire railway from Yarmouth to Norwich. They can spend thousands of pounds on feasibility studies, which were never part of railway building in the days when railways were actually built. As was reported in the Eastern Daily Press a year ago, “a further feasibility study into the station will be conducted in 2022”. The first one cost a mere £14,000, and this one will certainly cost much more – a minimum of £250,000 in fact! The study already completed has suggested that up to 200,000 passenger a year could use the new station. Maybe if the council moves as intended onto Broadland Business Park this might put a bit of urgency into the scheme.
My personal interest in this scheme is not great. I will never need to go to Broadland Business Park by road or rail. My own idea is to open a station in Cringleford, which would provide connections from UEA and the hospital to Norwich and Cambridge (much more useful), but this is mere daydream. Depending on that afore mentioned feasibility study, it would be necessary to conduct a third phase of development studies (of up to five years) and finally, in 2028, the construction of the station could start- at a potential cost of £20m. This would depend on the Department for Transport agreeing that the scheme makes financial sense, and for the railway companies involved to be keen on the project. In other words don’t hold your breath.
At least the future of the BITTERN LINE is safe, although there was talk of closing the station at Salhouse if one was opened at the nearby Business park. This is something I would be loth to see, as I still have a wish to travel from that station to Cromer. We could park at Salhouse station for free, something that would not be possible at Norwich.
SALHOUSE STATION
JOSEPH MASON
THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORT IN EAST ANGLIA
THINGS you should consider before selecting EQUITY RELEASE
EQUITY RELEASE is a way of acquiring part of the value of your home to spend as you wish, while continuing to live in it. Except for a few brief periods, houses have increased in value faster than inflation has increased the value of other commodities ever since the 1960s. If you are feeling a bit hard up you may think ‘why not go for some nice fee money’? Sounds too good to be true? Perhaps it is.
I probably should not be giving you financial advice. I am sure some law prohibits me from doing this. Unless I had the appropriate qualification of course; however I don’t care. My excuse is that I am not giving you advice on disposing of your assets; rather I am discouraging you from indulging in such financial speculation altogether. Equity Release may be a bad idea, one that you might regret later when it is too late. With all the adverts pushing equity release as a boon to people over 55 it must be a money spinner for the institutions offering it; otherwise why would they spend so much promoting it. I wish to redress the balance and point out several of the drawbacks that these schemes have. So here are my nine reasons why you should be considering Equity Release very carefully.
1. Equity release will reduce the value of your estate and may affect your entitlement to state benefits. To be fair, this statement is a direct quotation from an Equity Release brochure; but there are other caveats too.
2. Consider carefully if you intend to spend the money on temporary pleasures like a cruise or a holiday; is this worth the permanent loss of value in your home?
3. Home reversion; with this policy you sell a proportion of your property, typically for half its value. Because the benefit to the company is deferred the older you are when you dispose of it the less you will loose. So if you intend to give away your inheritance while you are still living through equity release, it will be the finance company and not your heirs who will benefit from any future growth in the value of that part of the property that you no longer own.
4. With a lifetime mortgage you will not be protected against any possible future losses in the value of your part of home. The finance company would be protected; it will already have got its hands on the value in money terms. With this kind of policy they do not keep a part of the home – they keep a part of the value of your home.
5. Lifetime mortgage; the finance company will charge you compound interest, which will become payable when you can no longer live in your home. The longer you live in your home, the less your estate will be worth.
6. You don’t have to borrow against the value of your home to pay for essentials; after all, those without any equity to release still survive.
7. For a home reversion equity release you must be at least 60 years old; by the time you are eligible for equity release you may be a bit old to consider major home improvements. The finance company would like you to do this however – you would have borrowed the money to improve their part of the propery! property!
8. The Financial Conduct Authority does not regulate Inheritance Tax Planning on Equity Release.
9. Consider why there is so much spent on advertising equity release; although they pretend this is for your benefit, it is done to increase the profits of the finance companies. It will ultimately be them that win out, not you. Don’t forget that the financial industry would not be making such a big deal of equity release if it wasn’t such a great money spinner for them!
In case you have been considering equity release, I hope that my caveats have come in time to stop you making any hasty decisions. There is a place for equity release, particularly if you have no close relatives as heirs, or you need an urgent operation. May be your children need a leg up onto the housing ladder. But you should carefully consider the cons as well as the pros.
JOSEPH MASON
INTERNATIONAL RAILWAYS
Should “International Railways” be entitled “Railways of Europe“? This blog relates to my own experience, and when I was twenty one I spent a couple of weeks in Canada. While in Montreal I went on a single carriage railcar, up to the city centre. I also went to the Canadian National Railway Museum, a facility near Montreal. Established in 1961 by its owner and operator, the Canadian Railroad Historical Association, the museum maintains the largest collection of old railway equipment in Canada, with over 140 pieces of rolling stock. There are also over 250,000 objects and documents from Canada’s railway past. Hence I have called my piece “International Railways“, to include my experience of North America.
My first experience of rail travel outside Britain was at Easter in 1965. I had crossed the Channel from Folkestone with a couple of dozen fellow pupils from Gresham’s School. The trip began on Thursday, April 1st, at 9.45 a.m., at Victoria Station. By train to Dover , and then the ferry to Belgium. At Ostend we got on a train as far as Cologne, where we spent the first evening looking round the outside of the cathedral. We got on the next train at midnight, and spent the night in couchettes, six to a compartment – it was surprisingly comfortable. As you can tell from what is written below, the German economic miracle was already well underway, a mere 20 years after the war. Not only was Germany much more vibrant than Communist Europe, it also put Britain in the shade. This was West Germany of course; East Germany was a Stalinist state, and I think even more bleak than Czechoslovakia or Hungary, who at least made some attempt to entertain tourists.
This was three years before the Prague Spring , when Alexander Dubček made a doomed attempt to break free of the Communists’ shackles. I was listening to Radio One on the 20th August 1968, when the Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. At the time I was quite a fan of the DJ JOHN PEEL, and I listened to him waiting for him to mention the awful goings on in Prague. He never said a word about it, and when somebody else took him to task for this glaring omission he weakly said “I didn’t think we were allowed to mention it.” This craven attitude ended my admiration for John Peel and I never listened to him again as long as he lived.
We got on the diesel powered express at Antwerp. We changed trains several times as we went across Europe to our first hotel in Prague. We slept on the train in couchettes. From Prague it was om to Budapest, again by train. From there it was on to Vienna and then back to Victoria station.
I travel again to Europe three years later but on that occasion I did not use the train. I did travel to France in September 1977, and that trip was specifically to ride on the Baie de Somme metre gauge railway. It was a preserved line, run by steam engines. I will include Wales in this examination railways, as it is an other country. I had experienced several narrow gauge railways there – the first being the Ffestiniog in 1963. The Vale of Rheidol and the Snowdon Mountain Railway followed in 1972.
I went to Denmark in 1982 and travelled by train from Aarhus to Copenhagen. The was then no bridge to the island of Zeeland, and the entire train was loaded onto the ferry to cross the water. A few years later I got married and the exigencies of raising a family meant that any railway adventures (and there were a few) were restricted to this country. In 2005, when they children were teenagers, we spent a week in Portugal. Some of the time there was spent in the Lisbon area, and while there we rode on the Linha de Cascais. This line had been electrified since 1926. It goes along the sea, where the estuary of the river Tagus debouches into open water of the Atlantic. This is a pleasant journey along the coast. We spent a day exploring the towns and villages along the routes of the railway. Despite some drawbacks it was all in all a lovely holiday.
My last experience of foreign rail travel was in 2011. I went on the railway that runs up from the Norwegian fjord we visited up into the mountains. This line was electric from the start, and it was built during the Second World War under German supervision. This means that it was constructed by slave labour. A miserable history, but now a charming journey
JOSEPH MASON
FOR MEMORIES OF THE PAST
ST BENET’S ABBEY, HOLME, NORFOLK
I learnt from medieval history that the livings of the parishes of St Botolph and St Martin (two now-ruined churches in Shotesham) both belonged to the Abbot of St Benet’s of Holme. Shotesham was the next parish but one to Poringland, where I was born. Shotesham – Schotesham in the middle ages – was about four miles away from my childhood home. I often found myself in the village. Little Witchingham was another living that belonged to St Benet’s, and that is about the same distance from my current home on the other side of the city. Caistor, even closer to my first place of residence, was also a possession of St Benet’s of Holme, but I am a little confused about this because I understood that it was given to the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds at some stage.
The point about all these places around Norfolk that were under the control of the Abbot of St Benet’s is just to stress how important this little island (as it then was) in the Broads was in the distant past. Another important part of the lands that the Abbey owned were the many watermills they possessed, dotted along the local rivers. One of these was at Hellesdon, and we read of many disputes they had with their secular counterparts over the rights to the local waterways. The monks of St Benet’s were definitely not merely spiritual men with their heads in the clouds; no, they were shrewd men of business, with a hard-headed appreciation of the worth of their worldly goods. They may have indeed been individually poor in terms of personal possessions, but as members of a religious community they were extremely well endowed.
An anonymous 14th-century chronicler recorded that this island site on the river Bure was occupied by a hermit named Suneman around 800 AD. Other hermits gathered at the site, drawn by Suneman’s simple life of contemplation and prayer. This isolated existence was brought to a sudden and violent end by the invading Vikings. Being on the river’s edge it was easy prey for these waterborne warriors, who arrived in East Anglia in the late 860s. The site was later reoccupied by another hermit, this one named Wulfric. In the middle of the 10th century a group of hermits rebuilt the church and founded a religious community which lasted some 60 years. In 1122 King Cnut was staying at Horning (Horning is the parish in which St Benet’s stands) and it was at this point in time that he founded the Benedictine Abbey on its island site. The first endowment consisted of the nearby manors of Ludham, Horning and Neatishead, formerly possessions of the king.
Another Benedictine Abbey was established by Cnut at Beodoricsworth (to become Bury St Edmunds), and the original community was reinforced by a party consisting monks from St Benet’s. Half the monks of the Norfolk Abbey went to the Suffolk Abbey, under Prior Ufi. They arrived bearing furniture, books and sacred vestments belonging to St Benet’s. Ufi became Bury’s St Edmunds first Abbot. Ulfi died in 1043 and his successor was Leofstan (1044–1065), another of the former St Benet’s monks. So you can see how close the relationship between St Benes of Holme and Bury St Edmunds was.
The great period of the Abbey was abruptly ended by King Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. Although he retained the Bishop of Norwich as the Abbot of St Benet’s (a title the bishop still retains) this did nothing to protect the fabric of the abbey. This was abandoned to the elements and more specifically to the depredations of local seekers of stone for building. Rather it was the decision of an eighteenth century drainage engineer to build a windpump into the ruins that has preserved a part of the Abbey gatehouse.
JOSEPH MASON
joemasonspage@gmail.com
THE BLOG FOR THE STORY OF EAST ANGLIA
BACONSTHORPE CASTLE
We had a look round the ruins of Baconsthorpe Castle on August Bank Holiday Monday 1971. It was a busy day; with my mother, father and sister we headed north to Reepham and Bawdeswell. On the way we went through a huge flock of Guineas fowl. We brewed tea in sight of Foulsham church and then on through Melton Constable and Langham to Morston. There my sister and I picked some samphire from the marshes. We got out four stoves – two Gaz and two spirit stoves – for cooking lunch. We had meatballs, mashed potato and fruit pie, over looking the sea on Salthouse Heath. After coffee it was off to Bodham and West Beckham before getting out of the car to look round Baconsthorpe Castle.
Baconsthorpe Castle was an unlicensed crenellated building, i.e. it had battlements but no official status as a fortified building. It is more accurate to describe it as a fortified manor house than a castle. Castle however it is, at least in Norfolk parlance. It was built in the mid fifteenth century by the Heydon family. The village of Baconsthorpe belonged to the Bacon family until the early years of 15th century. The site on which the castle was later built was acquired by wealthy yeoman called William Baxter. His son (a successful lawyer) began the construction of the manor house where the earlier manor house had been. He changed the family name to Heydon. Apparently this sounded more refined, no doubt because Heydon was (and remains) one of the most attractive villages in the county. Heydon is eight miles from Baconsthorpe.
The Wars of the Roses characterize the period, and the moat and walls show the advisability of such fortification at the time. As the Wars of the Roses passed and more peaceful times arrived Sir Henry Heydon added the Garden Court to the property. He was a staunch supporter of the Tudors from the start of the dynasty, being knighted at Henry VII’s coronation. As the sixteenth century progressed, part of the property was converted to be used to make woollen cloth. The production of wool became the most profitable of the Heydons’ activities, taking over from the law. However lavish spending exceeded even the profits from the huge flocks of sheep on the Baconsthorpe estate, and bad decisions resulted in huge debts accruing that caused the downfall of Baconsthorpe Castle.
Christopher Heydon died financially embarrassed in 1579, and his son William had to sell of part of the estate to pay his bills. But even as the estate was being decimated, the area around the castle was developed with a mere and formal gardens. Successive Heydons were made insolvent, and to try and rebuild their fortunes they sold off much the castle to provide building materials for nearby properties. The house at Felbrigg used a lot of freestone from Baconsthorpe (8 miles away). It was to no avail, and most of the property fell into disrepair or demolition. Only the outer gatehouse continued to be occupied as a dwelling place until one of the towers collapsed in 1920.
The hall passed through several owners until in 1785 it came into the hands of of the Mott family. They lived in the adjacent parish of Matlaske at Barningham Hall. Baconsthorpe Castle was gifted to the Ministry of Works by Mr Charles Mott-Radclyffe in 1940. The walls were covered in thick ivy after years of neglect, but by 1971 it was restored to its present state of preservation.
JOSEPH MASON
THE BLOG FOR MEMORIES OF EAST ANGLIAN LIFE
Eignteenth century engraving of Baconsthorte gatehouse.
CHATSWORTH
It was Saturday the 20th of March in the year that I was twenty-two years old. A bit of background to this story that I am about to relate; I was in my last year at college. I was living in digs, and my landlady was an unmarried lady called Penelope. She was 11 years my senior. She had recently had a new cooker installed in her house. It so happened that her married sister need a cooker, and the obvious answer was to pass it on. The trouble was that her sister lived in Derbyshire, and of course the cooker was in Oxford. This was where I stepped in; I had an estate car that would easily accommodate a cooker, and so I offered to drive it north for her. She gratefully accepted, and so on that weekend in March she helped me load it into my car. I set off for the Peak District in my transport at eleven o’clock in the morning. I set off on the road to Banbury and thence to Daventry. From there I followed the M1 to Chesterfield where I stopped for a Chinese meal for lunch.
My destination was the Chatsworth estate and so I left the M1 for Bakewell. I had to stop at the gatekeeper’s house, and ask him the way to Mr and Mrs Leach, Penelope’s relatives. In chatting to him I discovered that he was originally from Norfolk -Thorpe St Andrew! He drove in front of me, piloting me up the hill to Park Gate Farm, the dwelling place of the Leaches. I went past architect Thomas Archer’s aqueduct, originally built to serve the cascade outside the house. This was later to be employed by Joseph Paxton to provide water for the Emperor fountain, the 90 metre jet that rises from the lake outside Chatsworth House. This aqueduct also provides water that powers a turbine that generates much of the electricity needed by the house. This was originally installed in the 1890s, but on the arrival of the National Grid fifty years later it was discontinued. In the 1980s a turbine was reintroduced and now once more green energy for Chatsworth House is produced by the aqueduct. I delivered the cooker to the Leach household and also made the acquaintance of their dog Sam.
Then it was off once again, this time to South Yorkshire. I arrived at Doncaster on the M18. Then to North Yorkshire, getting to Driffield at five o’clock, a little before my school friend Peter. He arrived from Leeds University with four other friends. We were given tea and cakes by his parents, whose house we would all be staying at. We must have still been hungry because we went into town for fish and chips. Then we got changed into more suitable attire and I drove us all in to Bridlington. There were six of us, so it must have been a bit of a crush with one person riding on the luggage platform via the rear tailgate. We met Peter’s cousin and we all had drink except me, who was chauffeuring the rest. This suited me after my tiring day, however it wasn’t over yet by any means. Next it was off to the Bier Keller at Scarborough, where we danced till 2 o’clock. I partnered Peter’s friend Helen. We eventually got to bed in Driffield at three. The next day I left before Peter’ aunts and uncles gathered for a family party. I was sent away with a packed lunch. I got a bit lost on the way to Beverley Minster. This was about a decade before the building of the Humber Bridge. I almost went to the Land of Nod. This is real place, so I took a photo of the signpost. I returned by more or less the same route that I had use yesterday. I had already eaten my packed lunch, so I had a fizzy drink and a doughnut at a motorway service station. I got back at 3-30 and had a well-earned snooze.After the six o’clock news I read some of Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. I had been on a tour through part of Britain in the past couple of days myself. I found the book fascinating, although I was reading it as part of my history course.
JOSEPH MASON
THE BLOG FOR THE STORY OF THE PAST
SIR ROGER PRATT
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ARCHITECT
Sir Roger Pratt was born into a family of landed gentry; he may have been born in Buckinghamshire, he was certainly baptisted there in 1620.
He graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford University, but his legal career had only just begun when he found it wise to go abroad because of the deteriorating political circumstances in England. The Civil War broke out in 1642, and he left the country on the Grand Tour in April of the following year. He travelled as far as Rome, where he made the acquaintance of the diarist John Evelyn. As he ventured into France and the Netherlands he studied the buildings that were establishing a new European style in architecture.
Following the end of the Civil War and the execution of the king, Pratt returned to England in 1649 and took up his former position at the Inner Temple. Now, however, he also continued the architectural studies that he had begun during his six years abroad. At this period of his life he lived for half the year in his apartment in the Inner Temple, pursing his barrister employment but also living a full life of social obligations. Play going and walking in the parks of the capital where he would meet and chat to his equals took up a fair proprotion of his time. During the summer months he travelled around the country.
Despite this life of apparent ease he was establishing himself in architectural circles. Within ten years of his return to England he was given the prestigious job of rebuilding Coleshill House in Berkshire. This property had been bought by Sir Henry Pratt in 1626. Sir Henry’s son commissioned the architect Inigo Jones to design a pile in the most up-to-date style, but the architect died in 1652 and the oversight ot the execution of the building was given by Sir George Pratt to his cousin Roger. He also received commissions from Sir Ralph Bankes for Kingston Lacy in Dorset, Lord Allington for Horseheath Hall in Cambridgeshire and the Earl o Clarendon for Clarendon House in London. These were all the dealings of social equals, rather than the employment of a social inferior to carry out a design job.
Following the Fire of London a committee was formed in 16661; besides such names as Hooke and Christoher Wren Roger Pratt was also a member. However in 1667 he moved to Ryston, a village in West Norfolk near Downham Market, when he inherited the estate from his cousin Edward Pratt, son of his father’s elder brother. He seems to have abandoned his legal practice, and devoted himself instead to the business of agricultural improvements on his estate in Norfolk. He did however build himself a fine house at Ryston. In 1668 he was knighted, the first English architect to be so honoured.It is instructive to observe how Sir Roger Pratt went about his work. He did not often travel to the houses he was designing (Ryston of course was an exception). All his instructions were written down and sent out to the craftsmen working on the building, with extensive and exact dimensions of the interior and exterior. Architraves and cornices, facades and pediments were described with intricacy, and joiners and bricklayers were given detailed instructions. He was not a draughtsman, and he left the production of drawings to his subordinates.
Once he was living in Norfolk he turned his attention to English architectural practice; for example he gave general advice on how to judge a façade and how to determine its dimensions and what particular elements should be present. Quite who this advice was directed at is unclear; he was not teacher of architecture. ‘The contraryes to wch errours will easely give you ye perfections of a building’ he wrote.
None of Pratt’s houses remain intact today, even Ryston was extensive remodelled in the 18th century by Sir John Soane. He died in 1684, and although not childless all his three sons predeceased him.
JOSEPH MASON
THE BLOG FOR THE STORY OF EAST ANGLIAN LIFE
HOLME-NEXT-THE-SEA
SEAHENGE
HOLME-NEXT-THE-SEA lies on the north west corner of Norfolk, between Hunstanton and Thornham. Besides being the site where Seahenge was discovered, it is where Peddars Way reached the sea and travellers continued their journey across the Wash into Lincolnshire. Seahenge was a circle made from split oak tree logs with a central upturned stump. The site consisted of an outer ring comprising fifty-five small split oak trunks, forming a circular enclosure of around 7 metres. Their split sides faced inwards and their bark faced outwards (with one exception). One of the trunks on the south western side had a narrow Y fork in it, permitting access to the central area. Seahenge (as it came to be called) was uncovered by the action of the sea in 1998. It was removed for preservation and for eventual display, before the regular process of the tides could destroy it, which they would have soon done, once the sea had uncovered it. It may now be seen in Kings Lynn Museum.
The poverty of stones to make up a henge does not mean that none were built in Norfolk – it just means that they were built of wood instead. Unlike stone, wood rots away, and so the ancient circles have disappeared from view. It took a dry summer and a passing aeroplane to reveal the Woodhenge in Arminghall, and the erosion of thousands of years of mud and sand to disclose Seahenge at Holme. Woodhenge (discovered in 1929) is said to date from late Neolithic times and this makes it considerably older than Seahenge. Seahenge was constructed over four millennia ago in the Bronze Age. This makes it a few hundred years younger than its more famous brother, Stonehenge. The two Norfolk structures are the best known wooden circles in the country, but others undoubtedly existed in the past, and have either been obliterated by later developments or await future discovery.
NORFOLK is lacking in large lumps of rock, and this has made such stone circles as the Rollright stones (on the Oxfordshire/Warwickshite border) absent from our landscape. It is true that the monoliths that make up Stonehenge were brought from many miles away, but this was exceptional. Most of these structures were made of locally available materials. I know that the two structures in Norfolk were built of wood, but stone was also used where available.. Stone is rarely found in Norfolk, but some large boulders may occasionally be found in the east of England, left here as parts of the moraines deposited by the retreating glaciers in the last ice age. One such stone may be found at Ingatestone in Essex, where it forms part of the town’s name. Another boulder is to be found at Lyng in Norfolk. These single rocks cannot be made into a stone circle, but that does not mean they were not used to make a site of veneration; certainly that at Lyng has stories attached to it that indicate a ritual function in the past.
SEAHENGE
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