Hidden North Norfolk

Hidden North Norfolk

Mark Igoe

Copyright Mark Igoe 2013

Marco Books

Smashwords Edition 2015

Around North Norfolk looking at the unexpected side of this famous area; its less known monuments, its intriguing churches, its pubs and poets, its history and hammer beams, its fonts and folklore, pulpits and priories, famous phantoms, archaeology and more pubs, and linking to over 100 interesting websites.

With thanks to Rum, Brian, Rupert and Mouse

Contents

(Click)

Introduction

Merriment Valley (Holt & The Glaven Valley)

Saxon Shore (Blakeney to Hunstanton)

Honey Hills & Holy Vale (The Saxon Shore Hinterland)

Phantom Hundred (Towards the Wensum)

The Poppyland Coast (Salthouse to Mundesley)

Paston Country (The North East)

Introduction

This book evolved from Hint of Secrecy – Hidden North Norfolk on a Bike, which in turn had developed from a couple of other little books with the same theme. These were loosely based on a blog I had done on the Daily Telegraph website with my friend Paul about pubs and churches, which is why these two topics occur quite a lot. The word hidden caused critical comment that places like Walsingham or Briston are hardly hidden, but I believe that some things, like the 300 year old metal cello at Briston or the Hindu pilgrims to Walsingham are at least odd enough to warrant comment. Perhaps unexpected is a better word than hidden. But Hidden looks better.

Much of my research was done on a bicycle, and I would never have got to know the area as I have without my mates in the North Norfolk Wheelers. Of the many source books I used the two most helpful were the Historical Atlas of Norfolk by Ashbin and Davison, and The Buildings of England – Norfolk, vols 1&2 by Pevsner and Wilson. Of the online resources the site I have used most is Simon Knott’s marvellous Norfolk Churches, which I would recommend to anybody. Faden’s republished 1798 map is also available online and is a valuable source. The Norfolk Heritage Explorer site is another absolutely necessary resource, which I have used a lot. I am also very indebted to Richard Bristow’s Norfolk Pubs website, which I have been reticent to mention before because people are inclined to take it for a pub guide instead of an historical record. For maps I have used the Ordinance Survey Explore and Landranger series and, of course, Google Earth.

Apart from all these there have been the many friends, new and old, I have drunk ale with, and listened to their stories, enjoying them all, whether I believed them or not. You know who you are. Heartfelt thanks.

Merriment Valley (Holt & The Glaven Valley)

Baconsthorpe, Bayfield, Cley, Glandford, Holt, Letheringsett, Wiveton

I was once in a Holt pub, not an unheard of event, and I got talking to an ancient local. I must have lost track of the conversation because he startled me at one point by saying fervently I hate ‘em! I asked what it was he hated? Shannocks! says he. Well, I had been in the district long enough to know that Shannocks were inhabitants of Sheringham, but I couldn’t understand his very obvious distaste. Nor would he elaborate. So a few weeks later I asked my mate Geoff, himself a septuagenarian Shannock, and he smiled wryly and explained. Years ago, when these men were very young, Holt was a depressed agricultural backwater. Its children would travel on the train down to school in Sheringham, then as now, a thriving coastal resort. The Holt kids were despised and mocked for their un-sophistication and poverty. For one old chap at least, Sheringham had never been forgiven! The breath-taking irony of all this is that now Holt is a byword for wealth and refinement. Its quaint Georgian streets offer art galleries and choclatiers and you wouldn’t be surprised to bump into royalty in its elegant shops.

So what caused this remarkable metamorphosis? It can’t be the presence of the school, because Gresham’s has been here since 1555. Unlike Burnham Market, which relies heavily on second homeowners, Holt has got serious commercial activity and a light industrial site. But tourism dominates the high street with antique shops, cafés, pubs and a department store that has acquired the nickname of Norfolk’s Harrods. What small town these days has more than one fishmonger or bookshop? It is not inherently different from the other Georgian towns of Norfolk, so why this upmarket persona? Why did not the same thing happen to Reepham or Cawston or Aylsham? My guess is its geographical position, on the way to the up-market end of the Norfolk Riviera; poised in easy striking distance of resorts like Cromer and Wells, quaint villages like Blakeney or Heydon and great estates like Blickling Felbrigg and Houghton. Of course it has charm of its own too.

So its quite good place to start our exploration of North Norfolk, although how you define North Norfolk is a little subjective. Much of the county’s north coast is administratively in West Norfolk, while some tourist guides often include bits of Breckland and The Norfolk Broads. Folk in other flatter parts of the county sometimes call it High Norfolk. I’m going to take the best-known parts of the coast and work southward into the delightful and sometimes mysterious interior.

Holt is the Old English word for a wood and it was an established village and manor by the Norman Conquest. The town as we know it was largely rebuilt after a fire in 1708 destroyed most of it, hence its period look. By 1829 it had occasional assemblies, coach services to Norwich and London three days a week, several inns, the famous school and until recently, a racecourse, which was where Holt Country Park now is. Heavy goods – and some passengers – came from London by sea to Blakeney. In 1842, 14-year-old Edmund Savoury, one of a local milling family, breathlessly records a visit in a letter to his mother…

We had a very hot ride, were almost baked when we got to Holt where we stopped to bait the Horse and ourselves also. I enjoyed myself much. We had Tea, I had a famous good tuck out, I devoured three plates of Bread & Butter, two Crabs, half a plate of Shrimps, two plates of neat’s tongue and washed them all down with three dishes of tea which made me confoundedly hot afterwards. We met with an old acquaintance of Pa’s, Mr Thompson of the Bank at Fakenham. Old Joe Gurney and Mrs Fry are here likewise. Uncle took off his hat to them and they made him a most condescending bow in return.

Now, what did Lord Reith, Stephen Spender, Benjamin Britten, Sir James Dyson and Christopher Cockerell (the inventor of the hovercraft) and John Bradburne (see Cawston) have in common? They all attended Gresham’s School at Holt. This is now a private school, but was founded in 1555, about the time when people realised that with the dissolution of the religious houses (1537-1540), England had abolished its only free education system. Another pupil was Erskine Childers, who was to become president of Ireland, but who is not often mentioned. (His father, Robert Erskine Childers, served in the Boer War and became famous for a novel about a German naval ambitions called The Riddle of the Sands (1903), a book that Churchill was to credit with arousing British awareness of the German threat and resulting in British naval rearmament. However he went on to become a rabid Irish republican and was executed by the Irish Free State Government during the Irish Civil War, young Erskine getting leave from school for the funeral).

Until the early 20th century the school was situated in the town, in a large building that overlooks the Market Place and war memorial, and is now the school pre-prep. The prep school is a bit out on the Cromer Road and the main senior school buildings beyond that again, among playing fields and woodland. Holt’s emblem is an owl. The story is that two men once found an owl and put it in the village pound, whereupon it flew away. This may have been funny in the 17th century, but unless I have missed something, it has not worn well over the years. However an owl is a good symbol, with its connotations of wisdom and is still a common sight in the adjoining countryside. The town has churches at both the east and west ends of the High Street, St Andrew’s, a medieval building with a Victorian interior and the Methodist church, a Victorian building in gothic style. In the lane that goes up to St Andrews beside the Old School House is the public library in a building that used to be a livery stables. I was told that a retired soldier who had been in the Charge of the Light Brigade once owned this. I asked a local retired actor, Peter Whitbread, about it and he told me that as a child he had met the old man. In fact the veteran had not taken part in the charge but had been a boy soldier during the Crimean War. Still, it’s amazing to think that I knew someone who had met someone who had fought in the 1850s.

Holt boasts an impressive hospitality sector. The oldest inn is The Feathers; the building dates from the 17th century (1650 says the website), which implies that it survived the Great Fire of 1708. The first recorded landlady was Elizabeth Shepherd in 1783. In 1830 it was the terminus for the Norfolk Regulator coach service to London every Monday, Wednesday and Friday starting at 5.45 a.m. and the trip took 14 hours. It seems to have been called the Three Feathers until 1910 and its long survival is probably owed to the existence of the cattle market that used to exist at the back. The King’s Head, which is further up the High Street probably dates from the 18th century although the first recorded landlord was Richard Johnson in 1830. It was damaged by enemy action in 1941, as were several country pubs, which seems strange, and has to be attributed to Hitler being teetotal. But there are three other interesting watering holes in Holt. These are Balthazar wine bar, Byfords and The Watermark. The first is hidden in an alley off Shire Hall Plain, not far from Byfords. It is quaint, cosy and specialises in tapas. Byfords, which is teashop, restaurant, delicatessen, bar and posh (sic) B&B. Then there is The Watermark a wine bar and restaurant in the trendy Appleyard. Finally there is the demure and civilized Lawns Hotel, Restaurant and Wine bar. There are also several excellent tearooms and cafés.

About a mile out on the Cromer Road is Holt Station, not the original station when the town was on a real branch line, but the terminus for the Poppy Line, run by the voluntary North Norfolk Railway. This is a nostalgic steam railway with a full size rolling stock that uses the original stations at Weybourne and Sheringham. It is seasonal but you can check activities on its website. There is a bike hire business on the Norwich Road run by Mr John Overland and there is a bike shop, Cyclelife, behind Bakers & Larners at 6 Market Place.Well, Holt has an owl, what about a pussycat? The dominant building in Holt High Street and Market Place is the Gresham’s pre-prep, mentioned above. This used to be known as the Old School House, and was once the only school building. It was rebuilt in its present form in the mid 19th century on a manor used for the same purpose, which looked quite similar. This manor had been the property of the school’s founder, Sir John Gresham, but had originally been the property of the Perrers family. Although some modern historians dispute her identity, it was an Alice Perrers who was the notorious mistress of Edward III. Certainly there was the tradition that Alice came from Holt and if true, it would be another little irony that for generations Norfolk youth was educated in the house of the county’s most famous courtesan! So Alice Perrers is my pussycat.

Just over three miles south east of Holt is the village of Baconsthorpe. The name of the village comes from the Norman name Bacun and it was this family who produced the Carmelite friar and scholar John Bacon, or John de Baconsthorpe. He seems to have been a grandnephew of Roger Bacon (1214-1294, who came from Somerset) and studied at Blakeney Priory, before moving to Cambridge, Paris and Padua. He arrived in Padua about 1320 and they say he was read there for three hundred years gaining the nickname of prince of the Averroeists. And if you want to know who they were you’ll have to Google it yourself! The Heydons, who figure prominently in the Paston Letters, replaced the Bacons. These Letters are a collection of family correspondence written between 1422 and 1509, which are rich sources of information about the period. (They also contain the first reference in English to Valentine, as a metaphor for lover!) We’ll come across this family again and again as we travel around here and if you read the letters you find that for a period the Heydons are their number one enemies. And it was the Heydons who built Baconthorpe Castle. This is an ideal place for a picnic and just outside the village, well signposted.

There is a story that the Heydons, like the Pastons, were parvenus, peasants who became wealthy lawyers after the Black Death. But that is not the official story, which has them descended from the Heydons of Heydon Hall (which we will visit later) who had fought with the Black Prince and lost one of their number in France in 1370. Being self-made was not fashionable in the fifteenth century as the Pastons (who also invented aristocratic ancestors) discovered to their cost. In fact, the Heydons’ rise to prominence seems to have mirrored that of the Pastons – the law, sheep and politics. Aristocrat or not, John Heydon appears at Baconsthorpe and builds a castle in about 1460. It was a fortified manor really, just what was needed at that date, as he would have known well because he was behind the assault on the Pastons’ manor at Gresham, which we will also visit later. He was a member of a faction led by the Dukes of Suffolk – the de la Poles – themselves parvenus who had originally been Yorkshire grocers. The Castle is in picturesque ruins beside a mere that once provided water for a moat. The second gatehouse was built after the main building by Henry Heydon and was inhabited until the 1920s, when a tower fell down, fortunately without killing anybody.

The castle was turned into a wool processing and fulling plant when its defensive role became obsolete. The later Heydons were remembered mostly for their eccentricities. Sir William Heydon seemed to have inherited the family aggression and nearly fought a duel with John Townshend (of Raynham Hall, who we shall also meet later) that was only avoided the intervention of the Privy Council. He and his wife have a fine monument, which dominates the south side of Baconsthorpe church. Sir Christopher was an adventurer, astrologer and remembered for quarrelling disastrously with his father. Much of the castle went to build Felbrigg Hall and to pay his debts. Part of those, no doubt, were incurred by his erecting an eccentric and grandiose monument to his wife, Mirabel, which consisted of a huge pyramid that occupied practically the whole church at Saxlingham, a village near Blakney. It was dismantled in 1789 as being hazardous; also perhaps because the parishioners wanted their church back.After him the family lapses back into obscurity.

But before we leave Baconsthorpe Castle and its eccentric ghosts there is one other character to introduce you to. He is Zurishaddai Girdlestone, who according to Faden’s 1790s map, owned the castle in the 18th century. The Girdlestons were related to the Heydons so it makes sense. The quotation below comes from a book published by a Colonel Hamilton in 1860 and quoted by Simon Knott about a visit in 1804, by which time Zurishaddai had moved to Kelling Hall. (Zurishaddai was the father of Shelumiel, in case you are interested – Numbers 1.6