A trip away to the Norfolk coast. We stayed in an Air BnB sourced bungalow, situated on an estate of almost identical bungalows. The Royal Wedding was on the day we arrived. Large flagpoles in two of the neighbouring gardens flew the Union Jack. Other houses featured bunting and various other royal parephenalia. We saw no one one the first day on the estate, a trend that pretty much continued. If it wasn't for the pristinely maintained gardens it would have been easy to mistake the area for an abandoned holiday park. Once we had been there longer, the atmosphere felt more like an extensive retirement village, which it sort of was. Not quite a real place. Portmerion without the interesting buildings and people. More Neighborhood Watch than sinister surveillance, mind control and large white 'rover' balloons. But only a bit more.
On the second day we walked. Leaving the 'village'. The flag on one of the poles had been taken down, the other looked withered in the eeerie light of the morning sun, obsured in the haze of a sea fret, looking not unlike a 'rover'. But we escaped to Sheringham without incident.
After walking into Sheringham, we climbed the Beeston Bump. I say climbed. The footpath has been much improved since my last visit. It seemed a much more gentle slope that I remembered. The Bump is gradually eroding, but I think my perception of the changed incline was more to do with the erosion of my memory. Someone I was at sixth form with did a geology project on the bump and told me it was a drumlin. I couldn't find any reference to this elsewhere, but it is certainly the result of glacial activity. There was a second bump nearby many moons ago, which has been eroded away entirely.
The Bump is said to have been (be?) the lair of Black Shuck, a large ghostly black folkloric dog that is supposed to roam the coastline and countryside of East Anglia. An encounter with the beast a portent of death within the year. In some accounts it has one eye, like the Cyclops of Greek myth. Black Shuck is associated with the black hound of Odin, the origin of the legend possibly being brought to East Anglia by the Vikings. Arthur Conan Doyle is said (at least by the tourist info sign on the Bump) to have been inspired by the legend to write Hound of The Baskervilles after staying in the area. But Wikipedia claims that the inspiration was the Devonian legend of Richard Cabbell, of Buckfastleigh. Variations of Black Dog folklore exist throughout the UK, and tales of Black Shuck also vary. Sometimes he/she is not a bringer of doom but a companion.
There were several people of advancing years 'climbing' the mound, possibly inhabitants of the 'village'. They were a recurring feature as we made our way along the coast. Many had dogs as companions but I didn't see any large one-eyed black ones.
At the top of the bump is a concrete patch, the remains of a second world war Y station. The East Anglian coast had several Y stations, receiving and sending on radio signals to 'Station X' at Beltchley Park. The the image shown on Wikipedia (below) shows a bizarre octagonal based building looking like a combination of a bomb shelter and a windmill. It looks like it comes with an accompanying soundtrack of barely audiable shortwave radio.
Near to where the building used to stand is a trig point. I'm not sure if trig points always have a depression near each corner. Maybe this is a special edition including coffee cup holders. More importantly (in my mind alone probably) is that one corner of the trig point lines up with the West Runton TV mast which can be seen in the trees in the distance. Just not very well on the photo below, but it's somewhere beyond the head of the woman sitting with her back to the trig point. The TV tower is a 'relative' of the infamous Sandy Heath Transmitter, who's image seemed to feature on TV when I was a child almost as often as the Testcard. Usually in the morning during the mysterious 'Trade Test Transmissions' when it would be accompanied by some 'muzak'.
Laburnum Caravan Park, which is in West Runton, is where I used to be brought as a kid on our 'second holiday'. Our first usually being in Great Yarmouth but not always. My Dad's boss had a caravan here which he let us rent cheap for a week every August. West Runton and the caravan park in particular, are engrained in my psyche as a result.
We had a wander round the area at the top of the caravan park. The caravan I used to stay in, like all the others, had been replaced with much posher and more permenent looking models. They probably have running water and electricity now. Before there were strange smelling calor gas powered lights and cookers which had to be lit using matches, as well as standpipes dotted around the camp to collect water from.
Meanwhile the cluster of single storey brown amenity buildings were still there but they showed no sign of significant renovation. Indeed, the former gentleman's lavatory was boarded up and apparently disused. Here, people used to use the sinks to wash their faces and clean their teeth in the morning, before carrying their washbags over to the shower block to finish their ablutions. The toilets provided my first encounter with a condom machine which my dad told me contained bubblegum. I was somewhat miffed that he wouldnt give me 10p to get some and only realised a few years later that the machine really vended 'rubber johnnies', not 'Hubba-bubba'.
We were lucky, I suppose, to be in a caravan located quite near to the block. Particularly for my Dad after a he'd had a few pints Red Barrel, a 70s keg beer which made up for its lack of flavour by having powerful laxative qualities. He wasn't the only one in the 'stalls' suffering its effects at 3 in the morning apparently. The establishment providing the offending beverage, the West Runton Social Club, was just down the other end of the road that led from the caravan site and emerged into West Runton, a very small village. We didn't venture in that direction on this occasion, but the club is still there and welcomes non-members. As well as Red Barrel it used to offer Bingo, pool and Galaxians and the opportunity for the temporary residents of Laburnum Caravan Park to mix with the locals.
The migration of the gents to the old shower block was a bit disorientating. I felt like I was in a different version of the place I recalled from the past. We saw nobody and there was a conspicuous absence of posters advertising variety shows at Cromer Pavilion Theatre that I remembered always being displayed on the side of the shower block. These were oddly surreal, always in a mono dayglow pink, green, orange or yellow with black and white faces of the 'stars'. The bigger the 'star', the higher up the bill and the position on the poster, and the bigger the face. The faces were always neckless, floating as if they were apparitions in a parallel provincial showbiz dimension, smiling and slightly unsettling. Little and Large, Danny La Rue, Jim Davidson, Bernies Winters and Clifton (with ostrich) and Cannon and Ball among a rotating cast of grinning 'entertainers'. Seaside piers are still a stronghold for this type of 70s-esque entertainment, which has been pushed out or retreated to the margins of the coast, rarely seen inland or on telly anymore.
I was only ever subjected to one 'seaside special' style show which stared The Krankies and Russ Abbot , as well as some dancing girls. I knew the Krankies from the TV programme 'Crackerjack' and was still young enough to have been convinced that Jimmy Kranky was a real boy. This illusion was shattered when Jeanette Kranky did an encore and sang a song dressed as herself. Things got even worse when Russ Abbot came on with his backing band 'the Black Abbots'. My dad seemed to find whatever they were doing hilarious. I didn't and was bored for what seemed like a very long time until they went off. Having witnessed this, it's easy to see why alternative comedy needed to happen.
At the same time as young children were being made to suffer the tedium of Russ Abbot and his ilk by their parents, older kids were escaping theirs and going to see punk bands at the West Runton Pavilion. A counterpoint to its Cromer namesake, the West Runton Pavilion played host to bands like The Sex Pistols, The Damned and Siouxsie and The Banshees and is now the stuff of legend. The remit was wider than just punk, but firmly in the less mainstream arena. At the time I was unaware of all this. My only recollection of being in the building is at a children's roller disco. I dimly recall somebody saying Blue Oyster Cult were playing The Pavilion one night when the area seemed to have been swamped by lots of 'headbangers' in leather jackets and denim cut offs. This was the only time I remember a gig there being mentioned while I was on holiday and I wasn't sure what they were on about, being about 9. But Blue Oyster cult did indeed play there, for some reason under a different name.
Years later I had a tape of the Dead Kennedeys 'Live at Cromer'. This almost certainly was at the West Runton Pavillion, not in Cromer just up the road. The internet confirms the venue did indeed exist and West Runton, a village of probably less than 1000 people and few amenities was the epicentre of alternative music in Norfolk in the late 70s and early 80s. Something that feels a bit like it was made up or dreamt. By the time I was old enough to have appreciated it, it had gone and I had stopped going on holiday with my parents.
Any advertising had shifted to the side of the still functioning shop, but no day-glow posters were to be seen. I will forever associate this shop with tetra-pack milk cartons, which my parents used to buy most days when we stayed there. The opening of the cartons only marginally less frustrating and annoying than trying to do a Rubik's cube, and often a lot more messy.
The other significant locus in the caravan park for me was the rec. This used to be at the bottom end of the caravan park, consisting of a large green area at the 'end of the caravans' which contained a tennis court and at one end the usual collection of rec apparatus: a slide, a see-saw and swings. Slightly more unusual and a bit more dangerous was a swingboat which squeeked loudly despite the clumps of grease administered to its joins by the joyless caravan park caretaker. There was also a horse, which we discovered still existed along with the see-saw on a relocated and reduced rec not far from the toilet blocks, part of another large green area that was the territory of Peter Powell Kites and balsa-wood gliders.
I have semi-vivid memories of looking beyond the caravan park from the rec, inland towards a distant looking forest in the hills. Growing out from the trees was a l ariel mast, which seemed to belong to a distant and unreachable place. This fascinated me at the time. Maybe because it looked similar to the aforementioned Sandy Heath Transmitter, who's static image had undoubtedly been embedded in my subconscious during the trade test transmissions I'd seen while having breakfast in my pre-school years. During this walk my main 'objective' so much as there was one, was to reach the base of the West Runton Transmitter Mast, spurred on by the earlier sighting from Beeston Bump. My partner was less enthused by this endevour, but humoured me.
The Rec Horse looked like it had been reconditioned, less so the see-saw. These sat among more contemporary apparatus and on a surface of rubbery material apparently manufactured by 'Wicksteed', the name of a sort of amusement park near Kettering which I have vague memories of visiting during the same era that I originally played on the horse. Prior to their migration and the Wicksteed floor intervention, the horse and see-saw had been fixed on unforgiving concrete, often resulting in minor injuries. One boy, who my mum described 'having St Vitus Dance' got over-excited on the see-saw and fell of, breaking his nose.
The caravan pit, round the back of the amenity block, looked abandoned. This was the domain of the miserable caretaker, who I remember being chased away by with some other kids when we climbed in to see what we could find. We had a sort of gang, which being nine year old kids was a sort of poor man's Red Hand Gang. Instead of James Bond the Third and chopper bikes we had one fish-handled penknife between us. But the caretaker acted as though we were the most dangerous menace Laburnum had ever faced.
I dragged myself back to the present and we made our way out of Laburnum Caravan park and headed towards the beach. Not wanting to end up like the stick man on this notice, be considered fools or wanting a ride in a helicopter, we followed the more shallow incline of the concrete slope further up.
Apart from a cafe/toilet block, there was another structure, apparently randomly placed, a sort of shelter with a community noticeboard inside. One poster advertised 'geology walks' but these had been and gone on the day we arrived.
Onto the beach, the cliffs have some bizarre features . Here the rock has been blackened, as if scorched by a localised fire caused by some sinister force or being.
Possibly this was explained by the nearby footprints below. Had the hellhound Black Shuck passed across the rocks before making its way up the beach in the direction of Cromer?
Further along a rusty pipe served as an outlet from somewhere deep within the cliffs. Maybe a hangover from the days when sewage was pumped into the sea, while from the other direction oil spills washed up onto the beach frequently.
Looking along the beach towards Cromer, there were few if any people. The scene reminded me of the beach in the climax to the film Planet of The Apes. It could have been an another planet. Or this one in a more desolate future.
A sunken pillbox added to the brief feeling that we could have been propelled into the future, after some sort of cataclysm. The unstable cliffs are, I suppose, in a sort of slow motion cataclysm of their own, undergoing a destruction imperceptible when measured in everyday time. The pillbox was up on the cliffs in the second world war but the shifts since then have rendered it fallen and sunken into its current position. In geological terms, a timeframe so small as to be microscopic. I wondered how many more years it would take the cliffs to retreat as far as West Runton Social Club.
We drifted along the beach into Cromer. The modernist looking almost nautical look out building was put there for holiday makers, not the army. But its still standing. Typical architecture of the British seaside town, Cromer has several of these sorts of shelters dotted along the sea front where you can just sit, with sufficient shelter from the elements. Much better than the common park bench found inland.
The nautical theme continued with these impressive two story beach huts.
The path elevated us upwards towards the town. The list of names below probably a gang of kids on holiday. One apparently called BladE. I wondered if fish-penknives were still a 'thing'.
We rested for fish and chips and sat on one of the seatng areas between the road and the sea, hovering between the beach and the town on a concrete platform. We (or more likely our chips) were observed by a crow. The name Cromer is likely a corruption of 'Crowmere' meaning Crow's Lake. I don't know of any lakes in Cromer, other than the boating lake across the road from where we were sat. Maybe it serves as a current crow meeting point. The bird lurked patiently, but didn't get any of our chips. We needed the energy for the next stage of the walk, out of town and into the forest to loop back to Sheringham via the West Runton Transmitter Mast.
We passed through the town and 'out the back way'. On the fringes of the town we passed this curious establishment selling (presumably) 'Ales, Gas N' Lager'. It looked of a certain vintage and I wondered if it had been the supplier of Double Diamond, Harp Lager and the dreaded Red Barrel to local pubs and social clubs a few decades ago. The reference to 'gas' presumably referring to the sort used to dispense beer rather than calor gas or North Sea gas. I didnt stop to investigate, though, so I can't guaratee it. The window confirmed that it was an outlet for the Poppyland Brewery, which does a more contemporary beer range. The area around Cromer was/is known as Poppyland due to the prevalence of wild poppies. We must have come at the wrong time for them, I can't recall noticing any.
A boarded up mock Tudor building, looking not unlike a 'Tolly Folly', had most recently been used as a bar and lounge called 'Bouncers'. A name with dubious connotations whichever of its meanings are applied. Apart from, maybe, the unlikely scenario that it was named after the dog from Neighbours. I imagined this was an establishment sufficiently far enough away from the main tourist drag that the police turned a blind eye to local debauchery and at least knew where it was happening, until things got so bad they had no choice but to have it shut down. On the other hand it could have been too far for anyone to be bothered to walk or for many people to know about it, and just another marginal business finished off by the austere times we live in.
Another building with metal boarded windows was the flint chapel in the graveyard further along. The original windows, as well as the land the graveyard occupies, were donated in the late 1800s by Benjamin Bond Cabbell, who was a British Conservative politician and philanthropist. Not two things that can easily be imagined going together these days. He had a country house in Cromer, which at one time could be reached by a path from the cemetery. That and the windows he donated have disappeared. It appears the council has been trying to raise the funds to renovate the chapel, and presumably replace the windows, since at least 2008. Conan Doyle had dined as a guest at the Country House where Cabell furnished him with the tale of his Devonian ancestor and the hellhound, thus becoming another candidate as the person responsible for bringing the legend of Black Shuck to the area. The information provided on Beeston Bump didn't mention this, and shows the 'tourist information' provided by the heritage industry is sometimes presented within a certain margin of poetic licence.
Having left the outskirts of Cromer we travelled along a sandy path, passing under a striking orangy-brown railway bridge supporting the line between Sheringham and Norwich. It was the last piece of civilisation we would see for a while, and acted as a portal into the woody heathland that made up the next phase of the walk.
The path through the woods went on for sometime, often narrow and uphill. We saw few people and on several occasions were not sure that we were going the right way. We took a diversion at one point through a National Trust area of heathland, following the official paths which resulted in a dead end. Eventually we emerged onto a wide path/road where the land reached a plateau.
Signs of civilization began to reappear. Partially hidden in a hedge was an electricity facility featuring the familiar danger of death symbol and a helpline phone number for those facing it in the vicinity of 'Runton Tea Gardens G1844 41340'. Below this, the message appeared to be translated into an alien moss green scrawl.
Soon we reached the site known as the old Roman Camp. Whether there ever was a Roman Camp here is a moot point. It's been said it never existed, but is a tale used to draw tourists to the area. On the other hand, evidence of Saxon industry has been found here but perhaps the tourist authorities don't think that has the same ring to it. The site is known as Beacon Hill and is part of the Cromer Ridge, which we had been walking along. The ridge is made up of old glacial terminal moraines which marked the reach of the ice sheets during the last ice ages.
Beacon Hill is marked by a lichen infested flint based box. It has a roof and a metal panel with a small slit and a keyhole. What was kept locked inside I'm not sure. It may have been an elaborate donation box for the National Trust. But it looked like it had been unused for sometime, and seemed a curious and random structure.
Behind it was a post, marking the highest point on the ridge and in Norfolk, a county usually thought of as being flat and featureless. When I had first seen the post from a distance I thought it was the TV mast. I realised I must have missed the mast, somehow bypassing it in the woods. This seemed impossible given it was the most significant landmark in the area. But I had.
It only took a few minutes to locate the base of the transmitter which I approached through the deserted and quiet woods. At the base, surrounded by a fence festooned with a plethora of notices, warnings and imcomprehensible information. An unassuming brown box building sat at the base of the mast, along with a handful of electricity/telecoms boxes of various shapes and sizes. There were no people and a sort of sterile and otherworldly peace permeated the base.
The tower was impressive, in the form of a giant mutant pylon with various dishes attached to its sides and a white post pointing up from it's peak. Apart from the liminal nature of transmitter masts and their sinister hauntological aspect connected to 70s trade test transmissions, they are also the source of the both mundane and bizarre world of Regional television and radio. The white post at the top of the structure seemed to conjure up images of the Anglia Knight and Graham Bell. Meanwhile thetmysterious sounding Yagi Ariel near the top of the tower had been added to mark the 25th anniversary of Radio Norfolk, strengthening the FM signal and allowing the voices of real life Alan Partridge types to permeate the airwaves like never before.
The West Runton transmitter broadcasts Freeview TV and radio to about 11,000 people in Norfolk. It's one of a series of lesser transmitters in East Anglia, in areas too East to be served by the bigger Sandy Heath Transmitter. The 'partition' of the Anglia TV region into East and West in about 1990, to ensure people get news from 'your part of the region', meant where I lived there was an instant news blackout from the East of the Region, while we received news of the West, mainly dominated by stores from Corby, Northampton and Milton Keynes. Places I wasn't previously even aware were part of the Eastern region and which seemed more remote than, say, Ipswich or Norwich. For some years before I got round to visit Norwich and Ipswich they were frozen in time in my mind based on pre-1990 visits and images lodged in my head from About Anglia. Corby and Northampton, meanwhile, still belong in the East Midlands in my brain, the former a Glaswegian collony of flat roofed pubs and abandoned steel works, the later the base of Carlsberg and Alan Moore. Milton Keynes belongs in a time and place of it's own. The TV region seems out of kilter with East Anglia as it exists in my mind, as if the map had been slipped to one side during a clumsy weather forecast and never put back.
The tower was smaller than I'd imagined all those years ago from the rec, but it was still a bizarre and slightly unsettling site.
We headed away from Beacon Hill, past a horse sanctuary and through some heathland towards the village of Beeston Regis. Somewhere around here we were afforded a view of the Beeston Bump looming up in the distance.
Beeston Regis was a place eerily quiet and without signs of life. It was like an older version of the 'village' we were staying in and I guessed predominantly inhabited by the retired. The name Regis has something to do with Royal patronage. The place felt like it would probably come to.life in the event of a royal wedding or birth, but otherwise stay dormant.
Beyond the village is Beeston Regis Common, a marshy nature reserve. This offered a Lovecraftian path back to our 'village'. At this point my phone battery died and my recollection vague, my legs and cognitive abilities having reached their limits. But we made it back to our bungalow and the 'village'.
No comments:
Post a Comment