NCN 1 Norwich to King's Lynn
Stage 6 of the NCN 1 (Dover to the Shetland Isles)
Norwich to King’s Lynn 126km
Continuum
The route out of Norwich is along an old railway, known as Marriott’s Way.
Journal notes at Whitwell Coffee stop along Marriott’s Way
We talk about coffee, the different types as listed, and I ask him which is the most popular. He replies that it is a flat-white, although a few years ago, everyone asked for a cappuccino. He goes on to relate this story as he brews a macchiato.
A new recruit at a coffee shop is asked for an espresso. He apologizes to the customer saying there’s a problem with the machine, which he can’t work out. He apologises for the delay but the machine, he explains, was just pouring a tiny amount into the cup, so he had to press the refill button until the cup was filled, which is why it has taken so long.
Marriot’s Way is an ex-railway, 26-mile-long cycle path. It’s blissful - no cars, few people, hard-packed surface and re-used RSJ benches to sit on. It’s named after William Marriott, who invented a process to reinforce concrete. Two concrete blocks are inscribed with the words ‘wonder’ and ‘reflect’
Journal note written at cake and coffee stop in Beccles
In the groove now.
Very happy.
Roads v quiet, hardly seen a car all day.
The roads are flat and wide fields, the hedges full of red fruit, such as bryony, and tweeting sparrows.
Big bubbly clouds in the sky - same ones that Constable painted.
Now in flint country, so houses dark grey.
Yesterday in Suffolk it seemed to be the local rule that you MUST have your house painted.
Churches have round towers.
Never seen those before.
Google Search
Wikipedia; “Round-tower churches are a type of church found mainly in England, mostly in East Anglia; of about 185 surviving examples in the country, 124 are in Norfolk, 38 in Suffolk.’
The reason for their construction – mostly by the Anglo-Saxons – is a matter of dispute. Suggestions that the invaders wanted something to remind them of home.
Round Tower of Great Ryburgh Chruch
Continuum
The day becomes idyllic - rich blue sky, filled hedgerows, tidy fields, warm, no wind. The route winds along flint-lined lanes to Walsingham.
Walsingham.
Journal note written at Walsingham Catholic Shrine.
There is a beautiful calm here. There are many African men who seem to have volunteered their help to run
the place and many Asian nuns. A Fillipina nun welcomes me as I am basking on a bench in the sunshine.
‘Welcome to Walsingham’, she says ‘Have you been here before?’
’m about to respond, but she continues,
‘You should read the information before you go inside.’
She points to the cloisters where there are boards of words.
’I hope you have a happy visit’, she smiles and leaves me. I watch her move with grace and gentle purpose towards two new arrivals at the gate. She smiles and nods as they speak, her left arm gesturing towards benches in the sun and as they move towards them, she follows them with her eyes always smiling. I wonder if she has worries and concerns in her life - there is absolutely no trace of them on her face. It is wonderful to see.
There is a queue for the ‘slipper shrine’, the Holy of Holies for this place. It moves slowly forwards, and the anticipation of what is inside is heightened. When I arrive at the door, the lady asks me where I am from and she says that she is from the same part of London as I, just a few streets away. She is here as a volunteer for the summer, ‘but soon I will have to go back to University, if they open again that is’.
I sit at the back of the shrine on a hard, simple chair. A woman in front of me is on her knees fingering a rosary. Her lips are moving fast. A man sits at the front statue still. Light pours into the tiny chapel, illuminating a statue of Mary, who is looking sad under a Gothic-style canopy. Jesus hangs from his cross on the altar. Dunnocks chirrup outside. Dust motes swirl. Penitence, prayer and the mystery of man gather in this whitewashed room.
The chapel has three large signs inside;
Do not touch
Donations
Hic verbo caro factum est (Here the word was made flesh)
Back outside in the sun.
I spent about five minutes inside, just sitting. Being still. Empty of thought.
Now I am back out in the sun. I have not locked my bike, thinking that no one would pinch it here, of all places. I am watching a man who is stroking its top tube. He is admiring its geometry. He strokes the grey metal and lifts the bike. He nods his head and places it carefully against the wall. He puts both his hands on the drops of the bars, and then presses down on the Brooks Cambium rubber saddle. It gives a little, as it should, and he seems impressed. He nods again. He stands back in admiration, arms folded across his chest, before disappearing into the shadowed cloisters.
Defoe on Walsingham
’An ancient town, famous for the old ruins of a monastery of note there, and the shrine of our Lady, as noted as that of St Thomas-a-Becket at Canterbury, and for little else.’
Journal note, a couple of kilometres further on at the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham
In 1061 a widow named Richeldis asked in prayer as to how she might honour Mary. That night in a dream, Mary led Richeldis to Nazareth and showed her the family home.
Build a house just like this, Mary said to Richeldis, so people might honour me and my Son.
In a field a plan of the house was laid out and an angel agreed that this was just what was required and so it was built. Henry VIII ordered its destruction and other than a few stones in the adjoining abbey’s lawn, nothing now remains.
Other than……….
The Catholic chapel celebrating the same event down the road.
Walsingham, the town, has fed well on a thousand years of pilgrimage. Beautifully conditioned timber houses, smart hotels and an air of commercial serenity.
Inside the Anglican complex with its surrounding walls like those of a castle we go through the pandemic rituals, as intense as any communion.
Temperature, sanitiser, name and telephone number - repeated like a catechism.
Modern brick is everywhere and I have a feeling of being in a Midlands new town, such as Milton Keynes. The whole complex is empty apart from the student at the door, and me. The shrine itself is very small and dark. Lamps hang from the ceiling offering a dull red glow to the blackened walls. The altar is gold painted and Mary is wearing a billowing green dress.
I am used to the plain post-Reformation country churches of this land, and I find myself recoiling in my incomprehension of the gilt and idolatry.
The Anglican Shrine at Walsingham
A dogfight
A crow climbs into the impossibly
blue canopy of sky
to be higher than the hawk who
flies below him and who has
fuelled his inner rage.
A recent wrong that
only bloody revenge can right.
He dives like a Stuka
upon the gliding hawk who insouciantly
rolls in the air
and fires his talons
upon the crow
who, hurt
re-orders his flight feathers and
adjusts his flight into the hawk’s slip-stream
and launches at the long still tail
which is always one wing beat ahead.
That having failed, he tumbles
below the hawk,
a cloud of smoky black,
and tries a thrust from below, but
with a flick of a feather, the hawk
avoids the parry of the corvid’s beak.
On they fly over
the brown ploughed fields
and hedges clothed in
emerald greens.
With a
final rasping kraa,
the corvid flies mind-desperate
into the haughty hawk
who twists his talons
around the crow’s undercarriage
in a cruel embrace
it was
as if to say
Be Done!
And a cloud of
silk black feathers
falls from the sky.
Journal notes written under a chestnut tree in the grounds of All Saint’s Church, Burnham Thorpe
I read, last night, of the lethal shallow waters which prowl along the coast, creating steep and broken seas. Defences are more conceptual than real against the rising sea’s storms and surges.
Defoe wrote of the 1692 storm which killed 1,000 and destroyed more than 200 ships, a notice nearby tells of the 1953 surge which killed 300 and destroyed 24,000 homes.
It is impossible to believe that the sea could be so malevolent.
It is distant, still and lapis blue.
So calm.
I lie on warm grass under the palmate leaves
of a chestnut tree
and between dozing I think of Horatio Nelson
who has roads and squares across the nation
named after him
yet here in the village where he was born
and where he grew to be a man,
they wear his fame lightly upon their sleeve
with only a tiny plaque screwed to a wall
To recall his birth,
and the Nelson pub, now closed for restoration.
Burnham Thorpe Church
Journal Notes in a lay-by in North Norfolk
The country is all husked
dried up
like old man’s skin
standing corn
belts of dark green
trees under a late summer’s sky of Egyptian blue
am riding gently beside
a shoreline of summery innocence
Beside the turbid sea.
Red-brown fields loll against each other like picnickers
filled with sun
and summer wine.
I am just riding my bike
and grinning all day
with the fun of it all.
A field of Buckwheat
Journal notes sent from the Premier Inn, King’s Lynn
The last room in King’s Lynn. The start of the second week of September, schools are back and Covid is tightening its grip. Yet the town’s beds are full.
I’d tried all the other hotels only to be met with the ‘I’m sorry, Sir’, smile. My face must have looked desperate as a receptionist in a centre of town hotel rang up this place on my behalf and a room was found.
I arrived.
The rate was over a hundred pounds.
Golly. I said to the Lithuanian receptionist. Other Premier Inns come in at less than that.
Maybe you booked online, she said.
We made an arrangement whereby I would go outside into the carpark, book online, the last room which she was holding for me, and re-enter with my booking number in a few minutes time.
And so it was done.
Journal notes from a Premier Inn bedroom
The bike is resting against
the much scuffed wall
and I, late into town
lie outstretched on a bed
with a view of a carpark
and light industrial sheds
still resolutely grey
while the sun sets gold
in the mid-September sky.
I’d spent too long
at Burnham Thorpe,
immersed in the Arcadian dream,
forgetting
that l had many more kilometres to ride
and remounting with a reluctance to leave
so divine a place
I had to up my pace
and breath deep
and sweat a bit
passing
ironstone houses
and Sandringham where the Duke
was lying low away from his Queen,
and always following as I went
the little blue signs of Cycleway 1
to the town of King’s Lynn
where I arrived as the sun
sank into the sea.
Defoe on King’s Lynn
‘Another rich and populous, thriving port-town. It is a beautiful and well-built, and well situated town, at the mouth of the river Ouse and has this particular attending it, which gives it a vast advantage in trade; namely, that there is the greatest extent of inland navigation here, of any port in England, London excepted. Here are more gentry, and consequently is more gaiety in this town that in Yarmouth, or even in Norwich it self.’
King’s Lynn
Journal Note written on the old quayside of King’s Lynn
A great place for a film set
if you are into the Georgian scene.
By the Customs house
a set-piece grandiose affair
I read on a cigarette-stubbed board
that the town had once been part of the
Hanseatic League
and back in 1334, it had been,
the 11th wealthiest town in England.
George Vancouver sailed from here
it said
to grab a bit of Canada.
All is quiet now save
for two Polish fishermen
hoping to grab a bit of dab
from the muddy depths of the
town’s Great Ouse.
Four tables in the restaurant are filled. The streets are very quiet. No signs of the ‘gaiety’ of which Defoe spoke.