More Notes from Norfolk

A trampoline has been purchased for the children next door. This is an exciting development.

For them.

(I think this is a result of some parental units diagonal across the street having purchased one for their spawn and set it up in their front garden. There now exists a state of universal shrieking on Ramsey Close from about 2.30pm to approximately 8.23pm. Excellent time to be moving house, eh? Poor Sarah and Rob have lost peaceful nature of their standing at the back door for evening ciggys now.)

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Have thought of more things about weekend...

It should be noted that whilst I did go on about pebble beaches, there are also completely sandy beaches, which just have grey large-ish pebbles only up next to the boardwalk. The sand washes and shifts and so there are these intermittent preventative sea walls dividing the beach up into these little private beaches. There are also things called wind-breaks, which are little canvas-ey fences that people stick up around them. E says this is because British people are mad enough to go onto the beaches whenever the sun is out regardless of wind and cold. I do not think I have ever seen these before. There is also apparently a beach which has trees going right out from the forest; it was planted I think by the 1st Earl of Leicester of Holkham to combat erosion. (He also invented crop rotation, or a particular type of it maybe.)

Also, there are some really intriguing architectural things to notice in Norfolk, esp. out in rural Norfolk.

There is a technique called flint knapping that is used in combination with bricks for wall surfaces on building. The flint is from (I suppose) the vast quantities of flint stones on the beaches. Some of the knapped fronts are smoother than others. A lot of the walls in Norwich that are knapped are kind of jagged, but if you can see on this picture, the flints are pretty darn smooth. A person who knaps flint is called a flintknapper (tee hee hee -- take your hands off that flint!).

Some of the flint stones are not even split, the entire stones embedded in the mortar, creating a bumpy effect (sorry for the reflection in the window glass. You just kind of see so much of it that you are slightly overwhelmed by what to photgraph. There are entire little villages with this kind of wall on nearly every wind-ey wall and building.). I think that the flat flint kind must have been most expensive of the three, but E is not so sure.

It seems that much of this flint was collected from Grime's Graves as well... somewhere for an exploration, methinks!

Another unique feature of the landscape here is the presence of Round Tower Churches. East Anglia has the most Round Tower Churches in England. Since flint was so plentiful, it was used in church construction as well. Flint is not able to be formed into squares, so many towers (which also could have had double service as defence observation for protection) were round as one cannot really make a very good square tower out of rounded stones and jaggedey-edged rock. Many of these churches are over 1000 years old. You must click on the link above and go to the 'Why round towers?' section. However, just like our society, there had to be some sort of Christian one-up-manship; rounded towers were considered to be terribly gauche and poor. So parishes would fundraise for more expensive flat stones to be shipped in and the tatty round towers were torn down and replaced. A lot of these Round Towers are just out in the middle of fields or tiny little hamlets (that is an official residential area designation -- I want to live in a hamlet just so I can say that I have.) and signify areas that could not afford to replace them.

Another architectural character (although this is not as common as knapping) is wattling, we think. E has seen a documentary on it, but I had never seen it until a very high up section on a wall caught my eye the other day. It is kind of like shards embedded into the mortar length-wise.

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Have begun (sort of lazily) packing up room for move, which is inconceivably occurring in less than two weeks. Also have tidied so that Sarah can show my room and hopefully find someone to move in soon.

Tomorrow morning at 4.15 am, taxi arrives to take me to Norwich International. Will be in Newark by 3.00pm and shall probably be pooped, esp. if there are good movies on the flight. Mostly ready to go and am quite impressed with self for v. light packing abilities, although really ought to be sleeping at the moment.

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It is 7.10pm and it sounds as though a child is being sacrificed on the trampoline across the street. Maybe I should go and take them a torch for the pagan event.