Gunton Station is one of the most attractive on the Bittern Line. That has nothing to do with Greater Anglia and everything to do with the private owners of the north-bound platform and the surviving station buildings.
I’m no expert and can’t tell you whether a particular era is referenced in the preservation. Signs refer to GER, but the colour scheme is more LNER. No matter: this quaint re-creation deserves applause: fire buckets, weighing scales, hand-carts with period luggage, advertisements for Watson’s Matchless Cleanser and Colman’s Starch (as well as their Mustard) and The Royal Links Hotel Cromer: it’s a joy. Every time I pass through this station I try to peer through the frosted glass and wonder what they’ve done with the inside.
Does someone live in there? And if so, are they living in some equally ‘period’ fantasy or is it all mod cons and minimalist Scandi-design? Given what they’re doing on the outside, I hope they’re preserving whatever original features remain in the building. I may never know.
On this occasion rather than passing through, I get off the train. It’s one of those early jaunts where my timing is entirely dependent up on the railway timetable. There is a train every hour up this line, but not all of them stop at all stations. The more remote stations only get alternate hour services. For Gunton, for most of the day it is 45 minutes past the odd hours, with trains back into Norwich at 5 minutes past the even hours, with a journey time of about 35 minutes.
It worked for the planned route, but only just. A four mile walk inside of one hour forty-five is eminently do-able… except that doesn’t allow for the WAGL*. It doesn’t allow for getting distracted by flowers or insects or your own thoughts. It certainly doesn’t allow for spending the first ten or fifteen minutes just admiring the station.
Which is what I did.
Once I’d torn myself away it was a simple walk of field edges, country lanes and woodland. The hedgerows are heavy with fruit already and it feels too early for that. Ferns are still green and unfolding, how can there also be apples already ripening and golden wheat. Have I mis-learned my seasons or are they all a-drift?
Our famous wide skies are heavy with downy cloud, an unwanted duvet on a day of heat but no sun and no promise of rain. The day feels as truncated as the stump cross at Southrepps. Believed to have been erected in 1366, the cross originally marked the ecclesiastical holding of the Manor of Southrepps Bruisyard by the convent of Poor Clare’s at Bruisyard in Suffolk. Bruisyard is about 60 miles away. I have to wonder just how “poor” the Clare’s were.
The cross fell to the iconoclasts during the dissolution of the monasteries and the later purges of the
Cromwellians. Now it stands, meaningless and lichened, next to a rusting flag-pole. The convent is also long gone.
I remember when I always felt the past when I touched such faith-stones. Now I feel a wavering. I feel as though the stones themselves are no longer certain. I feel that the longer-lived creatures of our universe are watching the power we’ve accrued and are nervous. I touch the stone and I feel the breaking of a line, a hesitancy. If no-one cares, then all will fail…
…but if no-one cares, then why am I here? That’s the question that both the stone and I ask each other.
It remains there, for the time being. And I walk on. The question has no answer.
I walk down lanes and along field edges and through woodland.
I meet a trek of alpaca. Just what you expect to find in North Norfolk.
Crossing the Common I promise to return to spend more time just sitting. I wanted to stay, but not enough to miss a train, when the next would be two hours away. Why not? Why not spend two hours sitting among the reeds?
I was caught by butterflies. The dullest of them to begin with. A meadow brown. Ragged wings. A sad old thing. We never think about butterflies getting ‘old’, do we? We never look at how their wings get shredded, and their flight erratic, how they pant on landing, how slow to take to the air again. We never think that maybe it occurs to them is this it, then? Am I now done?
Ah but look at me, the Gatekeeper announces in all her finery. And she poses for her close-ups, precisely poised on a palm of leaves, hold one as a stabiliser, or a mirror. A starlet in a dusky gown of shining bronze and dulled copper, begging for a noticing.
After all, isn't that what we're all doing…just wanting to be noticed…before we flit our last dancing, and our wings shed their dust, and fray around the edges.
*WAGL = wallying about & getting lost
