So we're still in Norwich, where we fetched up last Thursday.

For those of you who've lost the plot -- and heaven knows I have -- we'd been covid-stranded in Cromer since March, but having received the green light to go home to Kuching (which we left in January in the expectation of being away just three months...), we're now in Norfolk's county town, where we're working our way through a list of essential (not to mention tedious and expensive) pre-departure requirements.

I read recently about a reopened theme park in Japan, where the management -- to minimize covid risk -- was advising roller-coaster riders not to scream, or at least not out loud: "Please scream inside your heart."

It's kind of become my motto for the era. We're all screaming inside our hearts at the moment, I think.

The only way I can survive is to take it all just one day at a time... This is not easy for planning, organizing, controlling characters like PT. But it's the only path to sanity. If I think too far into the future, the dark clouds fold in around me.

So, to give ourselves a bit of a break, after various jobs and before my cast is removed tomorrow (and purple though it is, I will be heartily glad to get rid of it), we thought we'd hire a car, and have a day out.

Excellent move.

Marriott's Way is a 26-mile path that runs from Aylsham to Norwich along the routes of two former railway lines, the East Norfolk and the Eastern and Midland, which closed for passenger traffic in 1959 and for all services in 1985.

There's a whole collection of circular walks that branch off this route, and yesterday we walked the Two Stations one, starting and finishing in Reepham.






Reepham is lovely. Rather oddly, it has three churches, all in one churchyard (St Michael's, St Mary's, and the now ruined All Saints).






Reepham is also a wonderful place for hollyhocks...





As well as disused railways, Norfolk has an extraordinary number of deserted villages.

Many factors drove this phenomenon, as the village we visited, Godwick, exemplifies. Climate change and poor soils definitely contributed to its decline. Some have suggested that "engrossment" (the process by which smaller fry get pushed out by larger farmers) also played a role.

Documents from the 1500s "describe the grouping of land in the hands of two tenant farmers, who may have encouraged people to move elsewhere and laid out fields across former tofts [individual properties]". When Edward Coke, a local judge, constructed his manor house and laid out his gardens at Godwick in the 1580s, houses were cleared, and when he built his Great Barn over the main street in 1597, it was obvious that the village belonged to the past. A map from 1596 shows houses, but they are likely to have been pulled down soon afterwards.

The church was already abandoned by then, and the tower soon collapsed. In the 17th century, however, "the fashion for follies led to a feature being made of the ruins... The ruined church ... was completely demolished and the tower alone was rebuilt in red brick..."

Sounds so contemporary, no? Another aspect of gentrification, with all its pluses and minuses.

Any which way, it's a hugely atmospheric place for a walk, especially when the sky is heavy and looming. The ruined tower dominates the site, but explanation boards point out the sunken lanes, marl pits, and remnants of toft boundaries.





I love that someone has composed haikus for many of these deserted villages. Godwick's is:

No villagers now;
Only sheep moving like clouds
Over the earthworks.

Another long-distance path that wends its way to Norwich (from Great Yarmouth this time) is the Wherryman's Way.


It's 36 miles long, follows the course of the River Yare, and takes its name from the wherry, the large, black-sailed cargo barges that had their heyday in the 19th century. As is the story in many places, the wherries lost ground to the railways. Numbers declined from the 1870s, and by the end of the 1940s none remained: "Some trading wherries branched out as boats for tourists to hire and sail on in the summer... Most trading wherries ended their days de-masted used to carry mud when the rivers and broads were dredged. Many were sunk and used as support for the banks of the region’s rivers and broads."

Which is kind of sad. But then, the wherries themselves replaced earlier boats known as Norfolk keels, so there we are, what goes around comes around.

There's another selection of circular walks based on this trail (Norfolk is nothing if not walker-friendly), and this morning we took our breakfast with us, strolled the Bramerton loop, and followed the river a little further along to Surlingham.





On a side-note, that low-carb pizza dough that I've been banging on about for a while now -- the one that can also be cooked in a frying pan to make hotcakes -- can be made (and somewhat more easily in fact) with coconut flour rather than almond flour. And if you make your hotcakes, put them in the fridge overnight, and use them to make cheese sandwiches, you get a really excellent low-carb portable breakfast. To be filed in the "Do This Again" category...


So... an interesting couple of days that underline -- as if we needed it in these times -- that change is the only constant.