Mousehold Heath Confusion

The original plan to walk between two WB Sebald exhibitions, from the Castle Museum out to the UEA, was abandoned. Emerging from the Museum, fresh afterimages were imprinted on my mind. Grainy scenes of Orford Ness and Sizewell sat alongside grim reminders of World War 2 concentration camps and colonial brutality. These were superimposed onto a liminal vision of the rural Suffolk coastal zone with its vast swathes of deserted beach and countryside peppered with strange wonders such as The Sailors Reading room and Somerleyton Hall. Into the mix flew the taxidermy seabirds in the Museum's natural history section. Not part of the Sebald exhibition but merging  into the images left by it they didn't seem out of place. In particular the absurdly grotesque large pelican, apparently shot by the Prince of Wales in 1802. I could imagine it instigating a Sebaldian diversion into an arcane and possibly fabricated tale of the Royal family. Pelican shooting as a relief from the day job of ruthless colonial surpression at the turn of the (19th) century.

It felt like a visit to the second exhibition might be a bit much to take in. The first needed to be properly digested. Instead we decided to drift to Mousehold Health, just North of the centre of Norwich. It was a place I knew little of, my expectations formed by a brief appearance on ITV Regional Television news and on a programme where Dr Alice Roberts visited the heath while discussing historic Norwich. It would be good to get to higher, more spacious ground and observe the city  from what I imagined to be a deserted grassy mound.

The heath is bifurcated by a road, which was the route we took. An earlier attempt to follow a path through a wood accessed via a promising looking gate, that looked like it would allow us to shadow the road unseen, was abandoned after it ended at a BMX/Skatepark. The road, trees either side, was a fast one and peppered with speeding cars and vans passing at irregular intervals. This slightly monotonous scene eventually opened out to one side. An ice cream van and a map board were signs that we had arrived at an entrance into the heath. Also in sight was what I took to be the pavillion shown on the map, a platform featuring a hexagonal or octagonal pointed roof, which is something I've always associated with the word 'pavillion'. The seemingly random piece of victoriana seemed to placed Tardis-like, as if providing a portal between the now and an imagined past.

Based on the presence of the 'Pavillion', we headed into the woods on the left hand side of the road, since the map had indicated the clearing Regional Television had planted in my imagination was somewhere just beyond it. The map also indicated several abandoned towers from an abandoned  brickworks at various intervals in the woods, adding intrigue.

The path/track we followed through the woods suddenly veered left and we found ourselves on a concrete path overgrown with brambles and budlia. On one side there was an apparently abandoned windowless building, part brick, part corrugated iron. It lurked behind a thicket if brambles. The broken warning sign hanging off the gate featured a simple exclamation mark on a yellow background. What it warned of remained ambiguous.

Opposite the building was a playing field, the other side of which stretched a long wall in front of a building which we took to be Norwich Prison. At the abandoned building, playing field/prison nexus it felt like we had shifted suddenly from an unremarkable but pleasant wood into a sinister peripheral zone. Our sense of direction, which we had previously felt certain of, became disoriented. The map board we had relied on to point the way suddenly made no sense. Checking Google maps, it seemed impossible the clearing could be this side of the road.

The concrete path went not much further before a dead end of brambles marked it's it's conclusion. Still disoriented and keen to extract ourselves from this zone, we retraced our steps and crossed the road.  On the other side was a diner, located in what looked like a former pub or house. Signs pointed to it indicating toilet facilities were also available. Up close there was no sign of a toilet block and the building appeared closed. The silence as I approached was uncanny. But upon opening the door I was greeted with the site of families gorging on burgers to a soundtrack of 'La Bamba' style Latin music. I closed the door again and the silence resumed.

Eventually we did reach a clearing on higher ground, covered in ferns and gorse, and heavily populated by dragon flies. It was as if we had crossed a line into the Jurrasic period. The clearing didn't look and feel like the one I had in mind. We sat on a lone memorial bench and had lunch. Upon checking Google maps again it suddenly became clear. The diner was the Pavillion, while what we had taken to be a Pavillion was a bandstand.  The diner lacked a 'pavillion-esque' roof or other features so had thrown us off the scent. It more resembled something from an American horror film, a creepy house in the woods. Things suddenly made sense. The confusion disappeared and the weird atmosphere with it. Soon after we left the Heath and headed back to lower ground via a long path hugging an allotment, which allowed a view of Norwich similar to the one expected but unseen from the Heath. A city whose outskirts required further investigation. But not today.