A Short Introduction
I will keep this short, because I've lost count of how many long introductions I've written to the previous versions of this project. It has variously been named "Due North", "Due South" "Go West", "Spiralling out" and other things depending on the nebulous idea of where I was going to start and where I was going to go from there.
This time around I am taking the very sound advice of "start where you are" and see where it leads.
Where I am is in Norwich. Where it leads will be based around railway lines (because I don't drive and I like trains) and railway stations (because I'm not mad enough to try to jump off between them).
I don't know what it is going to be, so expect it to be random. It will be meticulously planned and then the plan will be ignored, get forgotten, or be found to be unworkable because my maps and guidebooks are out of date, or my wet weather gear is even more weathered than I am, or for any number of other reasons. I urge you not to try to follow in my footsteps – unless you have fondness for wet socks, getting lost, and / or exploring the very well-trodden footpaths of our beautifully ordinary British countryside.
For myself, I am starting it (again) because I am tired of hearing myself say "I must get back into walking". Eventually, my self shouted back at me: GO ON THEN!
Norwich
Start where you are. Where I am is Norwich. But that's just geography, and not very precise geography at that. I am in the suburbs, living in the bungalow I inherited four years ago this week. A lot has happened in those four years…and a lot more hasn't. Hence, where I am is in many ways where I was four years ago, ten years ago, twenty…
…so why not start with a walk that I was doing twenty-plus years ago?
If you live in Norwich, you don't need me to tell you that arriving by train these days can be a dispiriting event. The main walk up into the City centre, up Prince of Wales Road, is, well, frankly, it's horrible. It was already on a slide, but the shut-downs of 2020 and 2021 have killed it. Once-decent pubs are empty and boarded up. Thriving offices look like redundant jobcentres, or ex-parole offices, or couldn't-make-it cabbies. There's a few small businesses pulling through, but night-clubs have gone to sleep, the old facade of the once-theatre, once-cinema, tried-to-be-a-nightclub is just falling apart. Doorways are makeshift homes. In daylight it feels dishevelled; I imagine at night it feels threatening. And that's sad, because I remember when it didn't.
If you don't live in Norwich, I would tell you not to walk up into the City by the most obvious route. I would tell you to cross over diagonally towards the Compleat Angler pub, and dip through its terrace down onto the Riverside Walk. Follow the river until you reach Pulls Ferry, and turn left to walk up through the Cathedral Close. You won't have gone out of your way, and it is a prettier walk…with bits of history thrown in for free.
I think I remember the Ferry in operation, at least as a tourist thing, but I might be imagining that.
Stories for another time. I didn't walk that way.
Instead I headed for a once-favoured haunt: Rosary Cemetery, and thence a circuit I remember being able to cram into a slightly extended lunch-hour. Because I know I walked it often out from the office, I must still have been working in the office, when I first walked here. I ceased to do that in 2005. I walked it occasionally for a long while afterwards, but to think that I started walking these paths, discovered them, nearly twenty years ago, or earlier, is something of a shock to the system.
I dug out the a set of leaflets for Off The Bittern Track published by Norfolk County Council and find a date of 1997. Does 25 years ago sound better than sometime last century? Both make me feel old.
In my anal admin officer way, I have labelled this batch of pamphlets "record set" – which I guess means I had copied them for other purposes. Perhaps if I wander through my walk diaries I will find out who I was back then. I suspect you don't need to know. What we both need to know is that I am less retentive these days…less organised perhaps…more apt to wander and see what happens.
At least here, on home turf as it were.
My plan was simple: Rosary Cemetery, one of my favourite places in the city. It has been much neglected since I am further away from it now, or maybe because I am closer to Earlham Cemetery which has its own charms. Then Telegraph Plantation, Lion Wood, loop round to Britannia Road, thus onto the Mousehold Heath circuit, drop down to the river, up Bishopgate, through the Close & back into town.
Rosary Cemetery is the oldest non-denominational cemetery in the country. It was founded by a Presbyterian Minister (Rev John Drummond) who, recognising that church graveyards were becoming overburdened, proposed a general municipal burial ground on freehold land to be guaranteed in perpetuity. It passed into public ownership, under the auspices of the City Council in the 1950s and remains a working cemetery…if that's the right expression.
It's divided into two distinct sections, and obviously it is the older haunts that are the most attractive. Entering as I generally do from Ethel Road, it is like entering a Cathedral Close, or passing beyond the curtain wall of a now-abandoned castle – the bustle of the world outside seems immediately stilled.
There are any number of paths, and all cemetery-ramblers will know that you just follow the instinct of the day. It might be grave art that calls you, or in these older wildlife-managed spaces of rest it might be flowers, or trees, or wildlife that asks you to walk this way or that.
For the first time, I notice the tomb chest of Anna Sewell and wonder…but no, a little research shows that this is not the author of Black Beauty.
Rosary is set on terraced ground, undulating terraces at that, so it may be the lay of the land itself that asks you to walk one way or another. Just go with it. I doubt I walk the exact same way twice.
Today my eye is caught by a fenced off section: warning tape at ankle height, with an added warning. Meadow Saxifrage – Do Not Mow. I take a photograph of various green things, and wonder if I should recognise the plant if I saw it. Evidently not.
The Norfolk Wildlife Trust website describes it as having delicate, snow-white, five petalled flowers and longstalked, kidney shaped leaves which, apparently, are not shared by any other wild flower in Norfolk. I will look out for it over the coming weeks. The NWT goes on to inform me that the species is in decline, with the disappearance of hay meadows and old grasslands, and also that the Latin name saxifraga means stone-breaking. I love that they think its medicinal use in breaking up gall-stones is a more likely explanation for the name, than that the Romans saw it growing through gaps in stonework and thought the plant caused the cracks.
Back in the Rosary, up in the new cemetery, I find another notice. This one explains why they are mowing 'wild garlic' which might in turn explain why they're protecting the saxifrage. I'm sure their mowers won't know the difference any better than I do.
For the record the 'wild garlic' concerned is (I think) the Three Cornered Garlic, a species listed on Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act in England and Wales meaning that it is an offence to plant or otherwise cause to grow these species in the wild. I have a species of what I am told is wild garlic self-seeded in my garden. But it doesn't look like what I've come to know as wild garlic. I am confused.
In any event, there is no evidence of invading or native white bells or stars or alliums of any other shape that could be the offending or protected article.
I wander off, to content myself with forget-me-nots, and other memories.
Beyond the cemetery and into Telegraph Plantation and thence into Lion Wood. I realise how long it has been. The main paths remain, but others have been blocked by trees felled or fallen not in the latest storms; well-trodden ways entice in unfamiliar directions. It feels more open than I remember. There are more bluebells, and more butterflies. A wren hops off the path to hide in the holly tree.
I have started to look at trees more closely – to see their alien, twisted, gyrating forms as some slow-motion dance. We're taught to grow straight and tall like trees – whoever coined that fiction had clearly never gone into a wood. There is nothing straight-growing about a magnificent tree. Every twist, turn, lean, reach, grasp, back-track, root span, prop, relax, regroup, spurt, bark-shed, leafing, budding, branching, blooming, all of it is responsive to the moment – whatever a "moment" feels like to a tree.
Be more tree, I think to myself as I see the freeze-frame of the oak, or the aerial side-step of the larch. Learn the difference between reacting and responding. And definitely respond.
Onto Mousehold Heath, through the dappled shade before being tempted out onto actual heathland. I know the Council want to restore more of the land to open heath, but have to deal with those of us who have become accustomed to it as woodland. I have no answer to any of that.
On other days, I am fascinated by the history I stumble across up here, but today I am simply taken a-back by the flowering of the gorse…the whinny bush…the broom…whatever it is you call it where you live. Very occasionally, I catch a scent of something, but mostly my sense of smell died years ago. I walk among towering golden-crowned gorse and catch hardly a sniff of what must be overpowering 'coconut' to most people….and I really miss it. I know how these flowers smell. I push my face into them, ignoring the buzzing of the smaller creatures with more business to be doing this than I do, but it is to no avail. I cannot smell anything. And I feel somewhat robbed.
Until I decide to simply content myself with the spectacle of them – and spectacular it is, I have never seen the heath so beautifully, harmoniously, ablaze.
That's the vision I hold as I wander back along the river and through the Close up into town.
Railway miles: 0
Walk miles: 5.5
Off The Bittern Track is now available on-line in an updated version, though I have a fondness for the hand-drawn maps of my original.
