The Norfolk Broads
The Norfolk Broads look like Nature's work, but they're a medieval building site: huge peat pits that flooded and became Britain's best-loved waterland.
Published
Quick Facts
- Location
- East Norfolk and north Suffolk, between Norwich, Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft
- Origin
- Medieval peat diggings, flooded in the 13th and 14th centuries
- Size
- About 303 square kilometres, with roughly 125 miles of navigable waterway
- Main rivers
- Bure, Ant, Thurne, Yare, Wensum, Waveney and Chet
- Number of broads
- Around 60 separate stretches of open water, of which only a handful are open to boats
- Protected status
- Run by the Broads Authority since 1989, with protection equal to a national park
- Famous wildlife
- Swallowtail butterfly, bittern, marsh harrier, otter
- Classic transport
- The Norfolk wherry, a black-sailed trading barge
The great landscape that was dug by hand
For centuries people assumed the Broads were natural lakes. They are not. They are enormous holes dug by people. From about the 9th century, East Anglians cut peat from the river valleys to burn as fuel. Norwich and the surrounding villages had little woodland, and peat was the cheap alternative. Over the centuries, the diggings grew to a colossal scale. Then the sea level rose, the climate turned wetter, and the pits began to flood. By the 14th century the workings were drowned beyond saving, and the digging stopped. What was left was a chain of shallow lakes linked by rivers.
The botanist who solved the mystery
The truth became clear in the 1950s, thanks to the botanist Joyce Lambert. She and her colleagues took core samples from the beds of the broads. They found straight, steep-sided edges, and the remains of baulks of peat left standing between the pits. Natural lakes don't have walls like that. The medieval records backed her up, with accounts of peat being dug and sold in huge quantities. It's a nice twist: one of England's most famous natural landscapes turned out to be a vast medieval industrial site, left to the water.
Black sails on the reeds
Before holiday cruisers, the Broads were a working waterway. Wherries, broad-beamed trading boats with a single huge black sail, carried reed, grain, bricks and coal between the villages and the ports. The big sail could be lowered quickly to slip under low bridges, and the mast was counterbalanced to make that easy. One famous survivor is the wherry Albion, which was restored by the Norfolk Wherry Trust. Seeing her sail is one of the best sights on the water. The Broads' pleasure-boat era began in Victorian times, and writers followed. Arthur Ransome set his children's novel Coot Club here in 1934, and it still sends families off to hire a boat.
Windmills, wildlife and a very big butterfly
The skyline is dotted with drainage mills, which once pumped water off the marshes into the rivers so cattle could graze. Berney Arms windmill, out on the marshes near Breydon Water, is one of the tallest of its kind in the country. At St Benet's Abbey, a mill sits oddly inside the ruined abbey gatehouse. The wildlife is the real prize. The swallowtail, Britain's largest native butterfly, is the Norfolk subspecies and lives in the fens here, flying in early summer. Bitterns boom in the reedbeds. Marsh harriers quarter the marshes, and otters, which almost vanished, have come back to the rivers. The Broads is also Britain's largest protected wetland, so it matters far beyond Norfolk.
What to look out for when you're there
Ranworth Broad has a church, St Helen's, nicknamed the Cathedral of the Broads. Climb its tower for a view across the reeds and water, and look for the painted medieval rood screen inside. Potter Heigham's ancient bridge is notoriously low and narrow, and it has humbled many a holiday skipper. Hickling Broad is a stronghold for rare birds, while Oulton Broad, over the border in Suffolk, is a busy boating hub beside Lowestoft. Best of all, slow down. Hire an electric day boat, pull over at a quiet staithe, and watch the reeds. You are floating in a medieval peat pit.
Notable people
- Joyce Lambert
- Arthur Ransome