Thornham

This ever-changing edge of sea and land.

I love this place. It’s where I know there will be curlew, and on the wet marshes on the inland side of the sea defence dyke, geese, ducks, egrets, depending on the time of year, and if I’m very lucky, bearded reedlings in the reeds along the ditches. Right now there are brents, and wigeon whistling, and always a marsh harrier hunting. On the saltmarsh, redshank and oystercatchers, and a curlew or two. Most years (not this one) there are twite, too.

I’ve no familial ties to Thornham, but maybe it’s just the best of Norfolk for me, everything I love here close together. Once it was a fairly important port, a harbour that boasted a granary and a mill, trade coming in and out. But the harbour, like many other east coast harbours, silted up. The last trader to use it was Nathaniel Woods, master of a two-masted sailing ship, sometime early in the past century. Now the narrow tidal creek is just barely navigable for a few small boats, most of which seem to stay permanently tied to the small landing stages along the creek.

The coal barn, last of the harbour buildings at the end of Staithe Road, is crumbling. In the highest of spring tides, it’s completely surrounded by water. Built in the 18th or early 19th century, it once it held the coal to heat village houses, brought south along the coast from the north east of England. Now its future is uncertain. If it survives — an arts centre is proposed — it will serve the tourism that is, as in so many places, both a benefit and a curse in north and west Norfolk.

South of the village, the land rises, becomes arable land. A drove — not much more than field access and a footpath now — runs from the coastal defences, along the parish boundary south, or the parish boundary follows it, which may be more likely. If so it speaks of great age. The track the boundary follows when it turns west is thought to be Iron Age. Perhaps this one is too, an argument strengthened by the presence (now obliterated) of an Iron Age/Romano-British ‘fort’ alongside it. The drove changes direction slightly at the parish boundary, to run in a long curve, past a 13th century beacon on a high point, towards the village of Fring, sometimes a paved lane, sometimes a track. It ends here, in an odd dogleg that suggest rerouting at the time of enclosure.

At the coast, birders and walkers use the sea defence to walk part of the Norfolk Coast Path towards Holme-next-the-Sea, or on to Hunstanton either on the path or along the wide beach, its shingle ridge edged with wide sand at low tide. Somewhere along here is the site of ‘Sea Henge’, the Bronze Age timber circle rediscovered in the 1990s. Preserved, half the timbers and the central, reversed, stump reside now at the little museum in King’s Lynn. Another nearby circle, larger, dated to the same period, was allowed to remain where it is, visible only at the lowest tides.

All along this North Sea coast are the reminders of a more recent history, the fortifications of World War II. Pillboxes and gun placements and other indeterminate buildings of brick and concrete crumble slowly into the dunes and marshes, home now to insects and spiders and other wildlife. The coast path and other paths, on the bird reserves that line this coast, simply pass by them.

Andy Peacock / Coastal defence at Titchwell, Norfolk. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Somewhere on this ever-changing edge of sea and land is where I’d like to have my ashes scattered, when the time comes, to the lap of waves, the wigeon’s whistle and the curlew’s cry.

‘And I being here have been part of all this
Caught & thrown like sun on water
Have entered into all around me’

Hugh Lupton, from the Norfolk Songline project. These words are carved on the sculpture by Tom Perkins that overlooks the sea near Holme.

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All photos mine unless otherwise indicated.

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In my current fiction work-in-progress, An Unwise Prince, when I described my character Audun’s home, it was Thornham I pictured.