More on marshes

For the third time this summer, the Camargue, Venice Verte, and now the Norfolk Broads, we have found ourselves in the marshes.

We first came to these Broads about forty years ago. Not too much appears to have changed, tho 'the Broads' themselves are visibly shrinking and under threat. The Norfolk Broads are ponds, channels and marsh areas that were actually made by men over a thousand years ago. As the first settlers moved into East Anglia they chopped down what trees were there, so when they needed firewood they discovered that the marshy black ooze beneath their feet, when dried, became a slow burning fuel, peat. So, they set about designing sharp tools, shaped them to shovel the earth out in neat even bricks of peat, then lay 'peat logs' out in stacks to dry in the sun. When winter came they had fuel for cooking and for warmth.

And for the monks at the Abbey in St Benet upstream, who burned thousands of peat turves each year, and the Priory Cathedral folk over Norwich way, these peat diggers became increasingly busy carving themselves out a living: chopping deep and wide holes into the Norfolk Marsh as they drew out the smelly earthy black peat that had become like gold to them. Then the sea rose, and filled their deep broad peat holes with water. And so the Norfolk Broads came to be.

Over time the broadwaters filled with fish, filtering reeds topped with butterflies, and waterbirds. So, the descendants of the peatmen took to slashing the reeds and sedge from invading their waterways and put them to good use as roof thatching. They set about catching eels and marsh fish and trapping ducks and water birds. They spent much time digging canals to transport their products further afield. Until the Industrial Revolution made all their efforts increasingly redundant.

Nowadays, it is pleasure boatmen, hobby fishermen, seasonal holidaymakers and occasional icecream vendors who throng the shores of The Broads. Many of these folk don't realize that The Broads are even under threat. They are decreasing in size. They are dying in parts. Mother Nature is silting up these ancient waterways, and when she isn't hard at work, Man is doing his bit to kill the Broads with his sewage and chemical effluents, the chief offender being household detergents. 

It remains to be seen if any government purse will be large enough to stretch to returning the Broads to its canal rich days, or whether, over time, it will revert to the boggy fens of dark ages past.

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Norfolk Broads, another marshland 

Laying peat turves

Miss Bec almost lost in the grasses of the Broads

Mother Nature and Man are reducing the Broads

Flowering marsh plants were once harvested

Harvesting would let in the sun 

Tales these Sussex churches tell

The weather is staying idyllic so we wandered into Suffolk, continuing our exploration of historic villages and came across Cavendish which once was an Anglo-Saxon settlement owned by Cafa, known as Cafa's Edisc, meaning Cafa's enclosure, from which Cavendish came down through the ages. A group of almshouses huddle pretty-in-pink below an immensely interesting church tower.

This church tower was of particular interest to Pete, as here, Sir John Cavendish hid his valuables, while being hunted down by peasants seeking revenge. John's son had killed Wat Tyler, the leader of the Peasant's Revolt in 1381. Wat, Pete believes, might be a relative on his mother's side.

John, though, was later caught just down the road at Bury St Edmunds, and ended up beheaded, poor bloke. Up in the belfry where John dropped off his valuables is an odd little priest's room, complete with fireplace and a window onto the altar. High up there with the bats.

A little further on is Long Melford which has several amazingly large estates bordering a very long village route that occupies part of what once was a Roman road. One of them, Melford Manor with its distinctive pepperpot towers, was the country retreat and deer park for the monks from the prosperous abbey at Bury St Edmond. What a life these monks must have had! A bit like nobility, tho' with all the prayers added!

Actually Elizabeth 1 came calling one evening, on one of her Ministers who owned the estate in 1578, and it is recorded that she was greeted rather royally by "200 young gentlemen in white velvet, 300 in black and 1,500 serving men". How very fine. I can't help wondering if mine hosts set up marquees out back in the deer park to store all the servants when not in use? And just imagine the logistics of trying to provide enough loos and meals for that number of staff, even for one night. Or, and more likely, they just did not bother. Ahh!

Long Melford's church, the Holy Trinity, is a quite gorgeous feature of the village, too. Its exterior is decorated in beautiful flush work, which is the ancient art of knapping flint and laying it, with limestone, to make a stunning textural and decorative element.

St Mary's at Boxford, further down the road, has some illuminating little memorials: a vicar who lost his son in infancy had a wee brass made and melded into one corner of the lady chapel floor, showing the child's crib and his little shoes resting on the floor beneath it. Above and to the right of David hangs a memorial to a rather astonishing Elizabeth Hyam, four times a widow, who after a Fall, in 1748, suffered a Mortification, which "at last, hastened to her End...in her 113th year." Darn that Mortification. What might frisky Elizabeth have continued to get up to without it? Wonderful tales these churches tell!

We slept in a farmer's field accessed by brushing both our side view mirrors on the hedgerows, left and right, so narrow was his lane. This was no ordinary farmer. His grandfather started the business in 1935 and his grandchildren are now working it with him. He had fields of produce growing both sides of the lane when we walked it later that evening. And free range animals to boot. To defy the supermarkets, he owned a farm shop in town where he provided produce to the locals that any delicatessen in Australia would have been delighted to place on their shelves. And it was crowded.

Most of the produce was homegrown: all the legumes were his and a wide variety of hand-cut herbs came fresh from his fields. There was bread from the next village collected that morning, and cakes, locally made and packaged. There were bottles of jams, chutneys and pickles and mayonnaise from shoulder-brushing farms just a few miles distant. Everything was local, fresh and gone today, if not tomorrow.

We bought dinner from his grand-daughter in his store, and ate tender organic pork lightly smoked, with a crunchy garlic-marinated zucchini, fresh from his fields. We tossed it off with an Eton Mess, mashing newly-harvested strawberries and home-made meringue, fresh from his store. Eating felt clean.

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Once built by benefactors as almshouses for the poor

Long Melford Manor with its pepperpot towers

Not bad for a village church

Flint and limestone flush work on exterior of Holy Trinity

In memory of the death of the vicar's baby son in 1606

Elizabeth, four times a widow, died aged 113

Tales from Essex villages

Winding hedgerow lanes, so narrow we had to stop to let cars by, brought us to Finchingfield, another picture postcard village clustered around a ford. Here, pretty pastel and tiled houses nestle higgledy-piggledy onto each other, their roof timbers curving into the lean. Many homes display pargeting, that charming patterned plasterwork finish that has been used to decorate homes since Tudor times.

Country fields are decked with barns painted black that look smart and stylish. Windmills are mainly white. In every little hamlet you can buy fat geese and ducks, free range eggs, pick your own strawberries, and tayberry jam: farm fresh, home-made, regional fare. Everywhere there are honesty boxes for goods available, that day, on display. It truly is a foodlover's paradise. No wonder Jamie Oliver is so used to walking out his back lane and picking up such fresh, crisp and regional produce. What is not to love about this fertile land?

Thaxted has a pretty almshouse sitting just below a windmill. Its old guildhall, tumbling over the main street in deep overhangs of toppling eaves, recalls the 1400s, when men of the Cutlers Guild built this gorgeous structure as a meeting place, as they set about their business turning Thaxted into the cutlery capital of England. Across a cobbled Stony Lane is a tumble of half timbered houses where Dick Turpin once lived. And whyver not? I could.

With their soaring church spires, marvelous produce, and legendary history, these Essex villages have it all: the perfect escape to the country, particularly beautiful in this soft summer sun that lingers here so much longer than in most other parts of England.

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Thaxted spire

Finchingfield above the pond

Patterned pargetting on village homes

Olde white windmill 

Tiered Thaxted guildhall 

Dick Turpin once lived here

Charming Clavering

We ferried from France to England and landed in Essex for a while, parked in a farmer's green field which has an amazing three metre high hedge of Lleylandii cyprus bordering it. Our farmer delivered milk to the surrounding district for 41 years, and in that time, he and his wife, never missed one day's delivery. He doesn't do it now, but someone else does, and every two or three miles along the little lanes we are driving we see different Royal Mail post vans, too, so little farms are still so amazingly serviced here. How long ago in Australia did we lose similar amazing services? Which government cut which budget that wiped them out? Such services still function in England, which, of course, may contribute to crippling this country, I am not sure. But I do love to see it these country folk being so well looked after.

The things we find we are missing now that we are in England are the beautiful plane trees that line the roads into French villages: the bread (oh, the divine bread! like nowhere else in the world); and we mourn the loss of our wonderful French espresso, although, to be fair, we have had three days of excellent coffee being served to us here. We just know, though, that this cannot last. 

One of these charming English villages we've been exploring is Clavering, which is where Jamie Oliver grew up. His father's pub is here and does a terrific trade, and no wonder, as his village, is a delight. A long village, it is a meshing of about seven hamlets, each with a green, like Deers Green, Stickling Green and so on. Local villagers were out in their full whites playing serious cricket on one of them when we arrived. Which is just what we love to see in an English village on a sunny Sunday after lunching on roast beef and yorkshire pudding in a nearby little black beamed pub heavily decorated with brasses. So quintessentially English. Below the church is a cluster of charming old thatched and tiled village dwellings, including one that is among the smallest ever in England, a one-up-one down 8' x 10' weatherboard cottage, once the home of the village ford keeper.

Following the ford, and in the field behind the church, is a tussocky green mound with a remnant moat, once the home of an adventurous French Knight who built his castle here after following William the Conquerer from France.

The church at the heart of the village is a genealogist's delight, full of dated lists, names and descriptions. If there are any 'Barlees' out there they might like to know that their ancestor, Haynes, oft mentioned in the church annals, had more than one wife. His first bore him 13 children though 6 small skulls reveal some died too young. On another monument Haynes remembers Mary, his second wife, as being "a loving and obedient wife" by whom he came by "a very plentiful fortune, but noe issue, beinge married two yeares and fower monthes".  Poor Mary, remembered for being barren.

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Clavering with its thatches 

The village forder once lived in this tiny home

Clavering Castle 

Mary left a plentiful fortune, but no issue 

Lovely old village sign 

Stained glass 

Woad in the Somme

Our second last night in France we had an invitation to stay at a farm in a village in the Somme producing woad: another interesting night. Woad becomes the prettiest blue colour when prepared as a dye and is extracted from a plant that belongs to the cabbage family.  When it is young it looks a little like spinach but as it flowers it grows long stalks hung with leaves. Harvesting waits till this time and is simple, just twisting the leaves off once they are mature around the summer solstice, and soaking them and the plant stems until they are pulp. The pulp is then compressed into shells, sundried and utilised when needed, by crushing the shells into a powder and adding water and sometimes urine, to cause oxidation.

Before the trade routes allowed indigo to be introduced to regions like France and England, woad was widely used. It has been found in cave drawings, on ancient pottery and even one of the Lidisfarne Gospels is illustrated in blue pigment that is thought to be woad dye.

During its heydey a little village near Amiens had three steam-powered factories, employing over 500 workers, producing woad-coloured socks, stockings and sweaters. Today there is no trace of that. It is a quiet rural village now with hardly any movement at all apart from bird flight atop its high spired church. But a little woad is once again being cultivated in this quiet village so things may not remain quiet forever.

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Fishing nets are sometimes the colour of woad

Woad prepared as a dye

 Mericourt-en-Vimeu spire

Paris in June

Since we arrived back in France we have been doing a bit of an Art Crawl, focussing on one of our passions, the Impressionists. So, for her big birthday bash, we decided to treat Bec to a week in Paris. That ended up not at all being the best travel decision we have ever made.

Our first day, her birthday, was not so bad: we found a lovely restaurant in downtown San Michele and sat down to a long leisurely birthday lunch which we eventually walked off traipsing the length of the Left Bank from San Michele to the Eiffel Tower, grinning. So.Very.Good.To.Be.Back.In.Paris.

Our second day, we queued for 1 1/2 hours to buy tickets for the Musee D'Orsay to see the Impressionists. We were not so worried at that point as we often have to queue, but we were so hungry after standing so long in the queue we didn't immediately enter, instead found a place to have lunch. We waited a long time for lunch, the restaurant was crowded, with folk from the M'O queue who were falling down fainting from hunger we discovered. We then had to re-enter the museum: another long queue, even with pre-purchased tickets. Inside, we found again that we had to queue for the special Edouard Manet exhibition that we had come for, so by now my teeth were well gritted and thoroughly gnashing. Nearly another hour. Luckily, it ended up being special, or I might have been found curled up in one corner insensibly ranting. I have only so much patience.

We queued then, late in the day, to enter each separate room of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist displays. Staff were on-hand nervously blocking different rooms with rope barriers at different times attempting helplessly to stem the massive flow. Van Gogh, in a separate area entirely, was practically non-negotiable given his popularity, but with persistence we managed to view his work over the heads of hundreds of tourists.

Not that the crowding in these exhibitions is much different from any of the other times we have been to the Musee D'Orsay, but we were still intent on seeing it though. Colour us determined. Well, colour Bec bemused. The accents in the queues were mostly Americans, and Australians. I didn't speak, I didn't want to be labelled as either. And I am sure everyone else in all the queues hated the mass of both of us.


Note to self: Do not ever return to the M'O in late June. And forget July. And definitely not August. No matter what. Note to M'O staff: Schedule specialist exhibitions, like Edouard Manet, in some other venue at this time of the year. That might reduce the insane traffic around the M'O at least by half.

Another day we took Bec to Giverny, as part of her birthday week celebrations. Oh woe! Where were our brains even then. In Claude Monet's house add about eight busloads of infant school children and you have queues of major proportions, compared even with the Musee D'Orsay. Or the Tuilleries Musee which we tried another day but, sensibly, quit before we started screaming like banshees. Add to that a temperature of around 37⁰C and you do not have a match made in heaven. Monet's house is rather cramped, and on this day was scorchingly hot.

I was bemused by the young children, wondering what interest any one of them might have had in Monet, his garden, or his art. Having said that we won't ever likely be back to check what they might have gained as we came away feeling that Monet's garden, which we have avoided until this birthday trip, was really just another well worn, and not even a very well cared for, tourist cliche.

There are two gardens: one near the house in straight rows, then a water garden which is a bit of a hike out the back. The row garden was fairly random: lightly planted, too lightly in truth, with cheap filler annuals that were falling down limp in the heat. Only two rows of the entire garden were opened, the others were blocked off, so viewing, and planting, was limited, and cleaning up at the end of the day after the tourist hoards was minimised. Not at all like the photographs rich with plantings of Monet in his garden in his time.

The water garden had one or two exotic specimen trees as part of its permanent display, but that is all. Most of the spaces were filled with dripping willow or masses of shady bamboo stands that gave it all just a tiny hint of Japanese. Nothing remotely exciting in terms of garden design. The most interesting thing about Giverny the day we were there was a flamboyant Japanese male tourist dressed up in traditional garb, allowing tourists to photograph him. Without his colourful presence the garden would have been a whole heap more boring I am afraid.

Days four, five and six were the same in Paris: more queues, more heat, taking all day to do just one thing. We left Paris in late June. Though we will definitely return. We always return. But, we'll come early in the Spring, mayhap, when the queues are not so extensive. Or later in the autumn when the air is cooler. Until then: Au revoir, Paris.

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View from under the Eiffel Tower

Miss Bec's birthday present

The Left Bank

Monet's house

A typical garden scene at Giverny

 Tourists loved this guy

Waterlilies were in bloom

Monet's pots, pretty enough to paint

Roses near Giverny

Chenonceau then, Chenonceau now

We bribed Bec with return visits to many of our favourite chateaux in the Loire Valley for the lead up to her big birthday. We hadn't bargained that in the last weeks of June we might fight just for air space by spending time there. We hadn't expected that one of our favourites, Chenonceau, where in past decades we have parked right up at the moat bridge (sat on it even!) would be blocked off, barred, and ticketed, kilometres back now, taking advantage of unprecedented mass of visitors at this time of the year.

When Diane de Poitiers, was granted this pretty chocolate box chateaux by her lover, Henry 11, she invited their friends to visit. A lovely place to welcome their favoured guests. Only later when Henry died, his wife, Catherine de Medici, so cripplingly jealous of Diane, finally had her expelled from Chenonceau and compensated with Chaumont-sur-Loire about five kilometres down the road. Catherine moved in and threw vast parties, shooting fireworks up from the long gallery she'd had built over Diana's bridge.

This day that we visited, four thousand others from all over the world, were there with us. Utter madness. Chenonceau is one of the most visited chateaus in the Loire. Dozens of tour buses disgorged ogling bodies who occupied every inch of available physical space indoors. Outdoors, the so-called Medici and du Poitiers gardens, fared little better. Wait till July and August, we were told by one of the officials at the gate, there are more than six thousand visitors a day here then. So, woe to Chenonceau. The future does not look good.

Almost impossible for either Diana or Catherine to have invited enough guests in their lifetime to do the damage to Chenonceau that we, in our bus and car loads, do now, in just a single day. The tragedy is we can see it happening before our very eyes: the old hand-painted tiles beneath our feet are wearing away to nothingness, swept by the staff as dust into the Loire at the end of a dreary working day. The soft chalky walls behind the roped and balustraded stairs are just as quickly disintegrating, mostly from accidentally brushing against them with knuckles as we all hold the rope leading up stairs. And so we reap damage and destruction. No wonder we pay through the nose at the gate.

Though, I read somewhere that this chateau is now privately owned. Still, someone is making so much money from these mass daily entrance fees that they must figure it is worth allowing any sort of damage daily. Pretty sad, Chenonceau.

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Chateau de Chenonceau

Diane de Poitiers, Henry's mistress

Catherine de Medici, Henry's wife

Fireworks were shot from the Long Gallery

From in looking out

We did a chateau crawl and Amboise was on the list. 

As was Azay le Rideau

And one of our favourites, Villandry