Rivers of High Norfolk

By Mark Igoe

High Norfolk is what the folk of flatter parts of the county call that undulating but inexact area of North Norfolk that is so popular with visitors. Along the banks of its four main streams some extraordinary people have gathered over the centuries, and this little book is to introduce you to some of them; to Aesuminus, for instance, the potter of Brampton, and to Johnson Jex, the scientific anchorite of Letheringsett, from Margaret Paston, the matriarch of the Bure, to Mary Hardy, the diarist of the Glaven. An extraordinary cavalcade of monks and martyrs, blacksmiths and lords, seamen and poets have lived by, worked on, or praised the four lovely rivers of this alluring landscape, The Bure, The Glaven, the Burn and the Stifffkey Rivers. This is not a history, for that you would need to search the sources mentioned at the end; but I have tried to be as factual as is compatible with storytelling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Igoe
• Release date: Nov 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310687150

Mark Igoe

Marco Books are written and published by Mark Igoe. Mark has written widely on travel, history and sport over thirty years in a half dozen different countries in Europe and Africa. He has published a dozen books, often co-authored by his wife Hazel, including a best selling guide to Zimbabwe and a popular guide to buying French property, published by Cadogan and branded by the Sunday Times. He has three grown up children and now lives in Norfolk, England with his wife and two bicycles, all better looking than he is.

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The Rivers of High Norfolk

Mark Igoe

Copyright Mark Igoe 2014

M A R C O

B O O K S

Smashwords Edition 2015

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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High Norfolk is what the folk of flatter parts of the county call that undulating but inexact area of North Norfolk that is so popular with visitors. Along the banks of its four main streams some extraordinary people have gathered over the centuries, and this little book is to introduce you to some of them; to Aesuminus, for instance, the potter of Brampton, and to Johnson Jex, the scientific anchorite of Letheringsett, from Margaret Paston, the matriarch of the Bure, to Mary Hardy, the diarist of the Glaven. An extraordinary cavalcade of monks and martyrs, blacksmiths and lords, seamen and poets have lived by, worked on, or praised the four lovely rivers of this alluring landscape, The Bure, The Glaven, the Burn and the Stifffkey Rivers. This is not a history, for that you would need to search the sources mentioned at the end; but I have tried to be as factual as is compatible with storytelling.

Contents

(Click)

The Bure

The Story of Pons Fornacarum

The Story of The Pastons

The Story of The Navigation

A Story of Two Demesnes

A Story of The Protector

The Blacksmith of Saxthorpe

The Mystery of Mr Cletheroe

The Stiffkey

The Feisty Farmer of Barney

A Tale of Lost Villages

Tales of a Hallowed Vale

Stories of Stump Island

The Burn

Forgotten Monasteries & Remembered Sailors

The Glaven

A Tale of Cinderella Village

Journal of an Era

The Story of a Scientific Anchorite

Bayfield’s Hawk and Dove

The Sad Tale of the Rector of Wiveton

Acknowledgements & Thanks

The Bure

The English county of Norfolk has been in its time both a rural backwater and the economic power house of lowland Britain. More often, it has been somewhere in between, like most counties, in a perpetual journey between extremes, driven by winds of commerce and history. When the Romans began their conquest of the island, the irascible Iron Age occupants, remembered by history as the Iceni, first became a client state, a theoretical ally, and brooded for eighteen years in their tribal fastness. Their culture featured that perplexing mixture of round thatched huts, exquisite metal work and their own coinage, often featuring a stylised pony. Then they were provoked into a bloody war, so fierce that it nearly cost Rome the whole island. In characteristic reaction the legions devastated their lands, and built a town on what may have been the main tribal centre, near modern Norwich, in about 70 AD, and called it Venta Icenorum.

The lap lapping of the weedy Bure,

A whispering and watery Norfolk sound (John Betjeman)

The Story of Pons Fornacarum

The place is known as Caister St Edmunds today, and it is a small village, although its Roman walls can still be easily made out, even from the London train, as you trundle into the approaches to Norwich. It covered an area of 70 acres with a basilica, baths, temples and town houses. Norfolk looked very different in those days, and the North Sea covered large parts of what are now the lakes of The Broads and their tributary rivers; the nearby River Tas was probably navigable then. An archetypal Roman road linked Venta Icenorum with the new capital of Londinium, and its route is now largely followed by the modern A140. But if Caister was the administrative capital of the new Roman territory, the industrial centre was 12 miles further north at a place whose Latin name we don’t know, but is now the village of Brampton. Here a 74 acre site was to include at least 132 pottery kilns.

Brampton is on the River Bure, and in those days was not far from the long -gone inlet either. Here the road from Venta Icenorum met another arterial east-west route that ran from the east coast to west Norfolk, and eventually connected with the trunk road from London to York, Ermine Street, at Durobrivae, as Water Newton in Cambridgeshire was then called. But where did it go on the east coast then? Nobody knows. That coast has been retreating for years before the battering of the North Sea, but there is a ghost of a clue. Still marked on the map is Eccles-on-Sea, although Eccles-under-Sea would be now a better name. Most of the village had gone by the 19th century. A lonely Norman church tower stood among the dunes long enough to be photographed, and Lilias Rider Haggard remembered seeing the skeletons in the churchyard being uncovered by the sea. But the clue is in the name; it comes of the British word ecles, meaning a church, taken from the Latin ecclesia. Why does a British word survives among all the other Saxon names along this coast? Was it because the Saxons found a Roman town here, with a road leading westward? Some people think so.

Anyway, the road did go west and met the Bure, and the north-south road to Venta Icenorum at Brampton. Of course Brampton wasn’t called Brampton then and the Bure wasn’t the Bure; one source says an older name for it was Ouse, which, like Eccles, is British. It’s a pity we haven’t got a Roman name for Brampton, so shall we make one up? Let’s call it Pons Fornacarum, Kiln Bridge, at least until someone corrects my Latin! It was presumably such an important industrial site because of its communications. From here you could get to York or London on slap-up Roman roads, the quality of which Norfolk would not see for fifteen hundred years. And this may have been the limit of river navigation too; in those days, indeed till much later, the river ran on a course nearer the village. Brampton sits on an elevation, just west of a large open space of drained low fields, on the far side of which is the Bure. But the river has only flowed here since the river was canalised in 1779. Before that it flowed much nearer the little hill on which the village stands today, and where Pons Fornacarum stood in the first century. Where the river curls round to the north west of the hill, it narrows, and this might have been as far as river boats could go.

Oxnead Mill

Perhaps those kilns were not all working at the same time, but still it must have been quite a sight with the smoke from all those ovens hanging over the little valley. Iron and bronze work was also carried on too, and presumably all the other ancillary businesses that were needed for a big industrial complex. There would have been butchers and tanners, carpenters and smiths, ostlers and innkeepers, stevedores on the docks, and local big-wigs lolling about in the bath house. We know it was painted red, orange, white, black and grey. Better than that, we even know the names of a couple of people who might have bathed in it. One was Aesuminus, who owned potteries here, and whose potter’s mark has been found in other Roman settlements in Norfolk. The other was Marcus Cocceius Nigrinus. We know about him because an inscription was found nearby with these words:

The vow to the goddess-nymph Brigantia that he made for the welfare and safety of Our Lord the unconquered Emperor Marcus Aurelius Severus Antonius Pius Felix Augustus (Caracalla) and his whole Divine House, Marcus Cocceius Nigrinus, Procurator of our Emperor and most devoted to his divine power and majesty, has gladly, willingly and deservedly fulfilled.

Marcus presumably had served in the north, among the Brigantes, as Brigantia was one of their deities. What the story behind the stone is we will probably never know, nor how Marcus came to be in the Bure Valley in the first place. So we will just have to use our imaginations…and keep a sharp eye out for nymphs.

When I first explored this valley it was not to look for nymphs nor anything Roman at all, and there isn’t much visible anyway. It was to see the little church of St Mary in neighboring Burgh-next-Aylsham. I had been shown it before by members of my cycle club, but it is very special. It boasts an East Anglian Seven Sacraments font, but that is not to what strikes you as you enter. The