Ringland to Taverham by canoe

ON A summer’s day River Green at Ringland quickly fills up with picnickers and paddlers. But within a hundred yards the canoeist leaves civilisation behind. The river winds left and a long row of elegant poplars demand to have their pictures taken, their trunks reflecting in the crystal clear water.

Then the Wensum begins a long lazy meander. Cattle graze the meadows to the left while horses are stabled on the right bank. Today, an early June day that felt like hot July, I heard one solitary cuckoo and caught a glimpse of a retreating kingfisher. Banded demoiselle damselflies flitted from leaf to leaf by the dozen, the blue-black band across their wings making the males instantly recognisable.

Swans too were on patrol. Give them a wide berth and you’ll be fine. They are very territorial, especially when protecting a nest. If they curve their neck back and half raise their wings, watch out. It’s called “busking” and it’s a warning to keep away. I’ve yet to use my paddle, but I’ve felt safer with it on a couple of occasions.

Nature has provided a new bridge on this stretch. A poplar has fallen clean across the river, creating a dam to be by-passed. Was it the wet winter of 2013/14 that did the damage? Then the river gets more claustrophobic. Dodge and weave around low-lying branches of alder and white willow.

Costessey Lane gets closer in time to catch a view of the white-washed Beehive Lodge, originally one of the lodges for the long-demolished Costessey Hall. Then road and river diverge, leaving longer and longer gardens for the selection of static caravans and houses which lie undetected by all but us river-users. Almost every one has its own home-made staithe, even if it’s just scaffold poles and aluminium ladders. And then the country becomes more open again. To the left, the grounds of Taverham Hall prep school, to the right, the Taverham  Mill nature reserve. After three miles on the river, the sluices here mean our journey’s at an end.

Turn around in the slower water dominated by yellow water-lilies and head for home.

* Non-natives to Ringland need a £5 annual licence to launch from River Green in Ringland. See the Ringland Parish Council website for details.

Ringland: where was the Union Jack?

RINGLAND has just the one pub now, The Swan with its idyllic position at the end of The Street, overlooking the Wensum.

But in the old days there was another. It gloried in the name of the King of Prussia until 1915 when some local soldiers ripped the sign down. Clearly the landlord then decided that a name-change to The Union Jack might do wonders for trade in the context of the First World War. 

The same boozer with its different name apparently flourished right through until the mid-1960s, but where was it? Looking at this photo my money would be on The Street up towards the church? Can anyone tell me for sure? Please email me at sanddsilk@btinternet.com if you can help.

Drayton Old Lodge: 1914 and all that

REMEMBER “EBR” inscribed into the wall at Drayton Old Lodge? Well, after a bit of help, I’ve found the man those initials belong to. The details confirm that the Old Lodge was indeed built as private house rather than the Nurses Home which it later became.

The timing is quite poignant. Here was a successful man returning to Britain to build a mansion complete with grand hall, billiards room and drawing room. But as the first bricks were being laid, the First World War was erupting in Flanders. The house – with its sculleries and servants’ quarters - was being built for a world which would no longer exist by 1918. Just look at nearby Costessey Hall – demolished in 1920 - to see what happened to several old estates in this era.

Clearly Drayton Old Lodge did survive, though I haven’t yet been able to establish exactly when it became a Nurses Home. The late 1920s or early 1930s is my best guess at the moment.

Finally who was EBR? Well, you’ll have to wait till the book gets published for the full details.

Drayton: the ghost of a great poet

IN the middle of a heath, an incongruous clump of pampas grass. Look closer and you might be able to see that the land is suspiciously flat between the pampas and the copse. It’s the site, the exact footprint, of the old David Rice Psychiatric Hospital. It was built in the late 30s of the last century and demolished in the mid-noughties of this one. Who would have thought that an ornamental plant would outlive the buildings it was designed to grace?

Now owned by The Lind Trust, this 33 acre site was going to be home to a massive new church. Plans fell through after an acrimonious row with many neighbours. Its future is still uncertain but in the meantime the Trust is more than happy for us walkers to explore its gentle contours. Locals can probably see it returning to nature almost month by month.

It’s been much in my mind this week after discovering a little bit more about the David Rice’s most famous patient. According to the experts, Francis Webb (1925-1973) was one of the best poets Australia has ever produced. But he suffered from terrible mental health problems, so much so that he spent many months here, accidentally getting to know the Wensum valley in the process.

Thanks to the good old Millennium Library I’ve now borrowed a 1969 collection of his poems (It’s an inter-library loan all the way from Bucks, smelling beautifully of second-hand book shops and complete with loan dates stretching back decades. Excellent.)

I thought it would be his poems on named Norfolk places which would get me, instead this vision of a lonely night inside the David Rice knocks you sideways with its raw, melancholic power:

“The side-room has sweated years and patience, rolls its one eye

Skyward, nightward; hours beyond sleep I lie;

And the fists of some ardent Plimsoll have laboured this wall

Clear of its plaster beside my chosen head.

Someone murmurs a little, dithers in bed,

Against that frail call

Are imminent the siege-works of a huge nightfall.”

There’s much more, but you get the idea and I better be careful of copyright. His great champion in this country is Cameron Self of Literary Norfolk fame. Cameron knows his stuff. Read his summary to get a proper idea of what a big name Webb is in Australia, but also how Norfolk should claim him as one of our own.

I found it slightly eerie walking across this site even before Bucks came up trumps. The demo guys have done such a thorough job that there is very little evidence left of the hospital. But nevertheless the odd drain cover – and pampas grass - means that you somehow feel the absence of a building.

Throw in the “siege-works of a huge nightfall” and it’s safe to say you probably won’t find me up here after dark.

Picture Post: Sunrise on the Wensum

TOP tip for lazy photographers: don’t get up at 4am in the summer when you can get a good sunrise at just gone 8am during the winter. This is the Wensum at Drayton yesterday, looking south-east from the old railway bridge over Marriotts Way.

Drayton: Who was EBR at the DOL?

THIS is Drayton Old Lodge, a lovely wedding venue overlooking the Wensum Valley in the village of Drayton. It was a nurses’ home until roughly the early 1990s and then spent a decade or so as a conference centre. Today I would call it a hotel, but the website fights shy of that term. So “venue” it is. I thought it had been built in 1914 as a purpose-built nurses’ home, but now I’m not so sure – and that’s where I need your help. Take a look at this crest. it doesn’t feel “corporate” to me. There’s some suggestion that the building didn’t become a Home till 1917. So I’m wondering if this was a posh old pile where perhaps the owner perished during the First World War. But that’s complete speculation at the moment.

It’s a great spot, one of many along the Wensum where I have the sacrilegious desire to chop down dozens of trees. Without the woods on the hillside, you would have a gorgeous view down onto the river valley below. But I digress. Who can EBR have been in Drayton in 1914? And how was he (she?) related to HR. If you can help, please email me at sanddsilk@btinternet.com

December 15th update:

It probably closed as a nurses home in the 1970s rather than the 1990s. Documents at the Norfolk Record Office talk of it being the home of the Norwich Health Authority between 1975 and 1993. The NRO also has some great black and white photos of nurses at the home taken in the late 1930s. The photos of Sister Parr, Nurse Fincham and Nellie Burton were handed in anonymously in 2009. If that was you, do get in touch. Sadly though, the NRO had nothing to help me work out how the building started life.

The bloody legend of Bloods Dale

I GET the impression that many people who live in Drayton don’t really see much of the River Wensum. Busy commuters could be forgiven for not  even realising it’s there, hidden beyond the Low Road while they take the High Road to Norwich. Perhaps the legend of the bloody battle of Bloods Dale can tempt them. Here’s my first draft:

The land climbs steadily from the Wensum between the Low Road and the High Road in Drayton. A footpath bisects the two roads and just to the north lies an idyllic spot at the centre of a grisly legend.

It’s a field, trapezoidal in shape, with the unlikely name of Bloods Dale. And local tradition maintains that this was the site of an epic battle between the Danes and the Saxons in the Dark Ages.

“In a plantation near the road are traces of an entrenchment; and at a short distance is Bloods dale, said to be the scene of a battle in the Saxon era,” wrote one Victorian chronicler.

Notice how we all say “said to be”. No-one has the remotest bit of evidence, but tantalisingly 13 skeletons were dug up a short distance from here by navvies digging the Midland & Great Northern railway line in the 19^th century.

All that we can be sure of is that the “Bloods Dale” name has a long lineage. A 15^th century document talks of land called “Blodeshille” and “Blodisdale” owned by a Walter Nich of nearby Taverham. The first edition of the OS map from 1884 shows it as a large field running from Low Road to the brow of the hill, while a 1913 edition adds the wood we still see today.

And look again at your current OS Explorer. Bloods Dale is picked out from among all the other dozens of field names the cartographers could have chosen in the area. Well done Ordnance Survey for helping to keep this faint historical whisper alive down the centuries.