Chapter One
Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads

A Geographical Visit

In the Nature of Landscape offers an excursion around an eastern English wetland, the Norfolk Broads. This chapter introduces the region, and gives an account of cultural geography on the Norfolk Broads, ideas from a field of enquiry put into play. For over a hundred years people have taken boat excursions on the Broads; here cultural geography goes on the Broads, investigating landscape, finding how it might shape regional understanding.

This is not the first geographical visit to the region. In 1927 Albert Demangeon's Les Iles Brittaniques examined the Broads:

The peaty swamps, the still sheets of water hidden by reeds, the wide channels overhung by willows, and the lonely marshes frequented in winter by water-fowl exhibit Nature in all her wildness, loneliness, and melancholy. But in the summer these solitudes are full of holiday-makers, and the Bure, Ant, and Thurne, together with Wroxham, Salhouse, and Oulton Broads, are dotted with motor cruisers and sailing yachts. Away from the Broads and swamps, the ground is covered with grass and forms a rich pastoral district in which graze thousands of cattle. Green fields, grazing cattle, windmills, willow-lined channels, boats sailing among trees - all these remind one of the scenery in Holland. (Demangeon 1939: 282-3)

Demangeon shows an early twentieth century French regional geographic sensibility abroad, his passage signalling lines of enquiry followed throughout this book; the aesthetics of regional description, the geographies of regional discovery, and Broadland as a region whose 'curious features' are reminiscent of somewhere else (Demangeon 1939: 282; Clout 2009).1 The landscape features itemised too warrant continued geographic scrutiny; reeds and birds, marsh pastorals, cheer and melancholy, seasonal shifts.

This chapter gives an outline of region and book, conveys the possibilities of thinking through landscape and culture, examines early accounts of regional scenic governance, and considers regional cultural landscape as a term worth revisiting for its theoretical, political and poetic potential. The chapter concludes with a survey of Broadland institutions and scholarship, and an introductory Broadland tour.

Figure 1 Map of Broadland.

Source: Fowler 1970. © Jarrold-Publishing

Outline

Six rivers flow, some into one another, all waters ending in the North Sea. To make up the 'Southern Rivers', the Chet joins the Yare, and Yare and Waveney meet at Breydon Water. For the 'Northern Rivers', the Ant joins the Bure, the Thurne and Bure meet, and the Bure continues, ending in the Yare below Breydon. Only the Yare keeps its name to the sea at Yarmouth, though six river waters meet the salt; which itself moves inland upstream daily for various distances according to tide. Northern and Southern systems are gathered under the regional name of the 'Norfolk Broads', though the Waveney forms the Norfolk-Suffolk county boundary, the term 'Norfolk and Suffolk Broads' sometimes used. The broads are shallow lakes distinctive to the region, between 40 and 50 of them depending on definition, filled-up medieval peat diggings whose artificial industrial origin was figured with some surprise 60 years ago.2 Some broads sit to one side of the rivers, linked by dug channels (as with Ranworth on the Bure, or Rockland on the Yare), some occupy the river as if it had simply 'broadened' in its flow (as for Barton on the Ant).

The Broads appear in print in upper or lower case, and the conventions followed in this book can help clarify aspects of the region. There are many broads in the Broads, lower case individual lakes in a region named from them, otherwise termed Broadland. An individual broad achieves upper case when named, as in Rockland Broad, or Barton Broad. Deciding on a holiday, you might imagine cruising on the Broads (a regional experience), or on some broads (several points to visit). Such case conventions are followed in this book. One further element of regional nomenclature is worth noting, concerning fen/Fen. The Broads are sometimes regionally confused with the Fens, the former-wetland agricultural flatland in west Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, where rivers flow to The Wash. As a wetland, Broadland includes extensive fenland, but the Broads are not the Fens, and indeed there are few fens in the Fens.

Instructive questions of terminology also surround the status of Broadland as wetland and/or waterland. Broadland as waterland carries qualities of scenic beauty, land framing water, free open air, leisure for profit, territory for regulation. Broadland as wetland triggers a poetics and politics of habitat, a landscape neither-water-nor-land, refuge for flora and fauna (human included), or waste wanting reclamation, needing drainage (Purseglove 1988; Bellamy and Quayle 1990; Giblett 1996; Cameron 1997). In The Conquest of Nature Blackbourn (2006) traces conflicts over German water landscape, the reclamation of marsh and fen provoking both eulogy and lament concerning the transformation of landscape and German identity. Parallel regional matters of hydrology and identity shape Broadland, whether in the maintenance of grazing marsh as iconic regional landscape, contests over rights of navigation, or the defence of fen and reedbed as home for regional fauna and flora, against both human reclamation and natural succession.

Five chapters follow this one, along with two interlude studies of regional icons, the wherry and the windmill. An outline of book topography will convey the shape of argument. Chapter Two, briefer than the rest, addresses Broadland origins, but rather than begin with geological or prehistoric background, historiographic analysis emphasises contested narratives of regional landscape formation. The 1950s discovery by Joyce Lambert that the broads were flooded medieval peat diggings prompted argument over the regional standing of science, and the value of landscape features no longer deemed natural. In keeping with studies in the historical geography of science, emphasising both the geographical shaping of scientific enquiry and 'the geographies that science makes' (Naylor 2005: 3; Livingstone 2003; Lorimer and Spedding 2005; Matless and Cameron 2006; Cameron and Matless 2011), the chapter shows claims to regional authority shaping the reception of origin accounts. Definitions of and claims to the region shape scientific argument (Matless 2003a). Here as elsewhere the book examines 'geographies of authority' (Kirsch 2005), with institutions and individuals exercising claims to regional knowledge.

Chapter Three turns to conduct. From the leisure 'discovery' of the Broads in the late nineteenth century, sponsored by railway companies and boat-hire firms (and with an associated discovery of regional folk life), the region has been defined through contested pleasures, as either essentially a pleasure waterland, or a nature region threatened by such conduct, with particular sites, notably Potter Heigham, a focus for dispute (Matless 1994). The moral geographies of leisure, concerning conduct becoming or unbecoming a particular landscape, are shaped through guides, novels, films, posters, detective stories, children's literature, political campaigns and policy documents, cultural geographic excursions on the Broads demanding that connections are made between such diverse sources. Policy debate has turned on the modes of conduct deemed appropriate to the region, and the scales of authority - national, regional, local - appropriate for Broadland governance. Thus the possibility of Broadland becoming a national park brought decades of argument over conduct and the geographies of authority; what kind of region should this be, and who should exercise authority over it?

Consideration of conduct in Broadland also encompasses folk life and the comic. Broadland as waterland of leisure life is shadowed by narratives of authentic regional culture. The working lives lived by those long resident, heard as manifest in folk song and dialect, have been subject to collection and performance by those beyond and within the region. The discovery of Broadland entailed the discovery of a regional folk, in keeping with wider enthusiasms for folk culture as emblematic of national and local identity. The performance of folk life, including its self-conscious articulation by local residents such as dialect artist Sidney Grapes, could mix serious cultural labour with comic effect. An emphasis on conduct in work and leisure indeed draws attention to the comic qualities of landscape, the Broads as a space of amusement, an issue perhaps neglected in recent formulations of emotional geography (Davidson, Bondi and Smith 2007). Jokes and satire, joy and laughter, shape Broadland cultural geography.

Between Chapters Three and Four, and Five and Six, come two interlude studies of regional landscape icons, the wherry and windmill. The wherry as river vessel carrying regional cargo, or pleasure craft carrying leisure visitors, has, over 200 years, stood for the regional present and past, and since the mid twentieth century been subject to heritage salvage. Another technology of air and water, the windmill, the key mechanism for drainage until the mid twentieth century, and since subject to efforts of preservation and restoration,...