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| | | From Shetland to the Scilly Isles, Open Country travels the UK in search of the stories, the people and the wildlife that make our countryside such a vibrant place. Each week we visit a new area to hear how local people are growing the crops, protecting the environment, maintaining the traditions and cooking the food that makes their corner of rural Britain unique.
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Helen Mark visits the Norfolk Broads, an area of outstanding natural beauty on the eastern edge of Norfolk. It is a unique area of water, grazing marshes, fen and woodland, and home to some of the rarest plants and creatures in the UK. It is Britain's largest protected wetland.
The story of the Broads begins in the Middle Ages: by the 12th Century much of east Norfolk had been cleared of its woodland for fuel and building materials and over the following 350 years peat digging was a major industry. It was carried out on a massive scale with almost every area we now know as the Broads digging its own pit, or tubary, for extracting peat as its principal source of fuel. The pits began to fill with water, making the peat more difficult to extract and eventually the diggings were abandoned. They eventually flooded and so was created the wildlife-rich wetland we recognise today.
Norfolk Broads Authority
The waterways of the Broads provided the perfect access to the North Sea and goods from the coast at ports such as Great Yarmouth were taken by boats to supply the growing communities springing up around the area. The boats that supplied these communities eventually reached their perfect form in the Norfolk wherry. The wherry is a single-sail boat that has specifically been designed to carry cargo around the shallow waterways of the Broads. No sailing vessels can be found like them in the world, the closest being the colourful Dutch boats built to sail the dykes on the flat reclaimed land of the Netherlands. Helen joins skipper Chris Shellcross and boat builder Mike Fuller aboard The Albion, the last of the Norfolk trading wherries. She is a classic wherry, with a black sail and is kept in perfect sailing order by the Norfolk Wherry Trust.
Norfolk Wherry Trust
Tom Williamson is an historian at the University of East Anglia and has written extensively on the landscape of the Broads. He tells Helen about the massive extent of the peat diggings and how the waterways and natural resources of the Broads helped Norwich to become a city that rivalled London in importance, creating a huge surge in population that made peat digging not only essential but economically very attractive. Communities built up around the diggings and it wasn't until the Black Death came to Norfolk and decimated the population that deep pit peat digging was abandoned. After the Black Death labour became scarce and costs increased making peat digging no longer economically viable. The extraction of peat wasn't completely given up, the deep pits were abandoned, but peat continued to be dug from the surface until the 1920s and 30s.
Tom Williamson
The RSPB reserve at Strumpshaw Fen is a special place: just six miles from the centre of Norwich, it could in another world. A precious wetland landscape, it's famous for its bird and insect life. Spectacular dragonflies and swallowtail butterflies, the biggest in England, flit and dart amongst the reeds. Marsh harriers swoop between the tree tops and even the bitterns have recently returned to the fen. Reserve manager John Haw takes Helen for a tour of the fen and explains how a recent re-working of the reed beds has provided the perfect habitat for the bitterns. An elusive bird, the bittern was once plentiful in the broads, but up until last year they hadn't seen one at Strumpshaw since the 1950s. It seems the hard work put in managing the marsh coupled with environmental changes have coaxed it back and now they even have a breeding pair. But it is the call of the male bittern that is perhaps how most people are familiar with them - the boom a mating call that can be heard up to a mile away. Did Helen hear one? Listen to the programme and find out.
RSPB
Guides to East Anglia
Eric Edwards has been a marshman for 35 years. Everyday he quants his punt across the river at How Hill near Ludham and begins the job of keeping the waterways of the Broads open. He clears out the silt and mud that are clogging the rivers and dykes, and cuts and scythes the reeds and sedge that threaten to reclaim the broads, selling them for thatch. He turns up in all weathers, rain, shine and cold. Marshmen were once common in the Broads, making a living from the fen, a bit of eel fishing and reed cutting enabled them to survive and even thrive but nowadays they are few and far between. He takes Helen into his secret world, a jungle world of head high reeds and sedge. Although they can hear the passing pleasure boats, they can't be seen; it's a private place in a public landscape and Eric loves it. He shows Helen how to scythe the reed and Helen ends her trip to the Broads by quanting up the river enjoying the tranquility.
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