Great Yarmouth to Pakefield 14th September 2020(bikes)
September 2020 sees us heading north east to Norfolk intent upon conquering the Norfolk Coast Path, or at least a version of it. Interestingly enough, the Norfolk Coast Path does not follow the Norfolk coast in its entirety, stopping at Old Hunstanton and abandoning the westernmost extent of Norfolk between Old Hunstanton and Kings Lynn/River Great Ouse. Furthermore, the official coast path does not always follow the actual coast line – for safety, access and practical reasons. We however, are intent upon following the coast of Norfolk as closely as possible. In reality you often need to walk the coast several times to see it all, since it includes the beaches, the cliff tops, the expanses of sand dune habitat and all the settlements that interact with the physical coastline. To add to the challenge presented by the coast path, we just happen to be in the midst of a Covid -19 pandemic.
Off to Norfolk!
Our first day is to be spent completing the Suffolk Coast Path attempted in January this year. We only had 5 days in January, so missed-off the Felixstowe to Orford section in the south and the Pakefield to Corton section in the north. Today we are going to right one of these omissions by tagging that part of Suffolk north of Pakefield onto the first part of Norfolk – Corton to Great Yarmouth.
Walking a linear section of coast, rather than a circuit of a small island perhaps, raises all-sorts of logistical problems. Not least is the issue of returning to the start point to collect your car. We often use our touring caravan as our walking base (although we swopped it for an AirBandB for our Suffolk walk), usually driving our car to the start of that day’s section. This means we have either to walk back to the car, or use public (or other) transport to return to it. Retracing our steps feels wasteful – since we’ve already walked that section on the way out – but walking back by a different route feels more virtuous. This latter is good when coast walking, since as I said earlier, there are lots of aspects to the coast.
Public transport in Norfolk is much more reliable than it was in Suffolk, where few coastal villages seemed to be connected to their distant cousins. By contrast you can travel the entire length of the Norfolk coast using just 3 or 4 buses. However, Pakefield to Great Yarmouth requires the catching of two buses – something we don’t fancy too much. We do have a solution to this problem. We have brought our bikes with us. Since we have allowed ourselves the luxury of covering some sections of our British perambulation by cycle, we will use them today.
So it is that we load our bikes onto the bike rack and motor down to Gorleston in Great Yarmouth intent upon cycling along the roads and trackways of the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts before returning to Gorleston by a more inland route.
By 10am we have managed to find a quiet spot on the west side of the River Yare. To our delight we are able to park for free on the road, although we later discover that the nearby car park is also free of charge. Cycling a few hundred metres south we pass the Gorleston-on-sea Lighthouse, built in 1878. This is a relatively small, brick-built lighthouse that is still operational. Another 100 metres further on we encounter the tourist area of Gorleston, where we have the good fortune to find the public toilets are open for use. This is a bonus, since with advancing years we usually need to avail ourselves of appropriate facilities. Donning face masks as a precaution, I am surprised to find they are not mandatory in a place where people are potentially close-packed and water/urine can spray into an aerosol.
Gorleston offers visitors a smart looking promenade and extensive sandy beach. The beach is mostly above high water and is almost certainly man-made, not that most of the visiting children would care about it as they make their sand castles.
However, most kids are back at school by now, so visitors are largely restricted to our age bracket. Fortunately we are able to cycle along the promenade and make good progress as far as Hopton-on-Sea 2 miles to the south. The route using my 25 year old OS map is a little uncertain, but Google Maps advises that Warren Road is suitable for cyclists. It alarmingly turns into no more than a footpath before returning to a road as it passes through one of the many holiday camps along this coast.
At Hopton we pause to admire the ruins of St Margarets Church.
St. Margarets
This church was the focal point of the community for 600 years before burning down in 1865. Modern day health and safety would advise against having a wood burning stove in a thatched building, with the tower acting as a giant chimney to draw the flames up. A new church was built nearby, with the ruins being rescued in 2014 thanks to local donations and the work of volunteers. I don’t know which Margaret was its patron saint, so I’ll nominate my mother for the honour.
Further south we cross the border into Suffolk and encounter yet another ruined church tower, this time dedicated to St Bartholomew (regretfully there are no Bartholomews in my family).
St Bartholomew, Corton
St Bartholomew, Corton has gone one better than St Margaret’s across the border in that they have converted part of the derelict church into a church hall. In truth the county boundary was north of Hopton until the meddlings of 1974 which gave Norfolk a slice of Suffolk. I bet that didn’t go down well with the locals, with most Suffolk people supporters of Ipswich Town FC. Were they forcibly converted from being ‘Tractor Boys’ to support ‘The Canaries’ of Norwich City thereafter, I wonder?
As we cycle through Corton we spot a bench with a view of the sea. The view is a little hazy, but an elderly couple sitting on the bench advise us that it was beautifully clear yesterday. Thanks!
Beyond Corton we pass alongside the Lowestoft suburb of Gunton and find our way down to the mixed sand and pebble beach. The tide is low enough for us to push our bikes and enjoy the lapping waves.
Out to sea a large farm of wind-turbines twinkles white at us in the morning sun. Inland the Suffolk Wildlife Trust manage Gunton Warren. Apparently this is Suffolk’s only remaining stretch of coast that exhibits all the natural habitats from shingle, through sand dunes, to cliffs and lowland coastal heath. This combination of habitats makes for a very rich flora and fauna, most notably migrating birds.
Climbing up onto the new sea wall it becomes apparent that there was a much older sea wall here at one time, which is now nothing more than broken slabs of concrete. I have researched on-line, but can find no information as to how and when this wall was destroyed – possibly as a result of the 1953 storm?
The broken concrete near the shoreline
At Ness Point we pause for photos of ourselves at the most easterly point of the UK. Here a large compass has been laid to indicate important points and their distance from here. Behind it is an area of industrial activity including a salt works, a gas works (in the process of being demolished) and a large wind turbine. The latter I know has been here for at least 25 years, but I suspect it has produced little by way of electricity for many years. On the cliffs beyond sits the gleaming white edifice of Lowestoft lighthouse, built in 1874.
We cross the swing bridge which spans the harbour and depart from the ancient area once known as Lothingland. Lothingland was the peninsular of land that was bounded on the east by the North Sea and on the north and west by the rivers Yare and Waveney, Oulton Broad and the Breydon Water estuary. In 1831, Lothingland effectively became an island when a cut was made between the North Sea and Oulton Broad to the west, giving access to the Broads beyond
On the ‘mainland’ to the south of the harbour entrance we spend a few minutes watching a dredger manoeuvring with difficulty in its narrow confines. There is something fascinating about watching large seagoing vessels lumbering around in a limited expanse of water – perhaps I shouldn’t have watched the movie Titanic!
With Pakefield only a few miles further south, we cycle past a statue of Neptune, through the plaza above South Beach and past Claremont Pier in front of the attractive collection of elevated Victorian town houses (now B&Bs).
Neptune
As the road turns inland we drop down to beach level where the concrete pedestrian walkway gives access to gaily painted beach huts. We are required to push our bikes here, but remount as we return to the more elevated footpath along the top of the low cliffs.
Finding a bench outside All Saints and St Margaret’s Church Pakefield, we gratefully stop and take lunch. St Margaret was very popular hereabouts. Apparently St Margaret of Antioch was the patron saint of expectant mothers. We encountered another church named after her on our walks on the Kent side of the Thames estuary, at Lower Halstow. My own sainted mother gave birth to 5 children, so it is perhaps appropriate that she too was so named.
All Saints and St Margaret’s Church Pakefield
A short ride along the clifftop path brings us to where we finished our Suffolk section. Returning to Gorleston our route takes us through the relatively new part of Pakefield and South Lowestoft along specially built cycleways. This is a town that obviously embraces the bicycle.
Dame Vera Lynne died earlier this year, but it was at Pakefield where I heard her singing live over a PA system when she was performing here back in 2008. At least I think it was her.
At the western end of Lake Lothing we cross back into Lothingland via Mutford Swing Bridge and Lock. Here is the Wherry Hotel overlooking Oulton Broad. Lake Lothing is the name given to the cut between Oulton Broad and the North Sea, which is where Lowestoft’s major docks and industry are located. Perhaps a little worrying for older residents who witnessed the 1953 floods, at high tide Lake Lothing can be several feet higher than Oulton Broad and several feet lower when river flooding occurs inland.
I used to keep my narrowboat Jenny Wren on the Broads at Beccles and many times moored outside the Wherry Inn. I have a video of my 34 year old daughter on the boat here thirty years ago. She has changed a lot in that time but the hotel looks no different.
Beyond The Wherry Hotel we take The Angles Way along the western coast of Lothingland as far as Somerleyton before crossing over the border back into Norfolk and back to the east coast at Gorleston.
Since we have time to spare we decide to load the bikes onto the bike rack and take ourselves through Great Yarmouth to the far bank of the River Yare. As our aim is to walk the entire coast of England and Wales, we have decided not to include river estuaries as part of this. This therefore means we can ‘jump’ over the Yare and cycle from the southern tip of the Yare spit to where we intend to start walking tomorrow – from the Great Yarmouth Bus Station.
And now for a bit of Geography: Longshore Drift operates north to south from Cromer down to Essex, with beach sediments making a net migration southward. At Great Yarmouth material would have been added over thousands of years to the northern side of the River Yare estuary. This would have initially formed a small point of sand across the river, deflecting the river flow southward. Over time more material would have gathered from longshore drift on the seaward side and from river sedimentation on the landward side. Today the Great Yarmouth spit has grown some 4km from the point at which the Yare would have originally emerged into the open sea. Geography lesson ends!
The drive through Yarmouth to the other side of the Yare takes us through heavy traffic and a 7km detour just to reach a point 200m across the river. This gives rise to the common excuse given by locals when they are late for anything: “the bridge was up”. Coincidentally the government approved the building of a third bridge across the Yare on 24th September 2020 – the day we returned from our Norfolk Coast Path jaunt – which by 2023 will make a similar journey considerably shorter and quicker.
Most of the Yare spit is occupied by engineering and other industrial land-uses. The southernmost part of it being occupied by the Port of Yarmouth, it is alas out of bounds to us. A ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ type security gate blocks our route and I half expect a man with an AK47 to arrest me as I take a photograph. Im not really interested in the ‘checkpoint’, but am fascinated by the tall steel structure in the distance, which we think might be a drilling rig in the process of being scrapped.
Checkpoint Charlie
Once the river crossing is completed in 2023 I anticipate the land-use on this side of the river changing rapidly, with the land having much greater value for residential and tourist purposes than for industry.
As we cycle north we come across a quite bizarre sight in the midst of all this heavy industry – Great Yarmouth’s very own Nelson’s Column. It was paid for by local businessmen and erected from 1817 – 1819, long before its more famous ‘facsimile’ in Trafalgar Square . It is also known as the Norfolk Naval Pillar and the Britannia Monument, with its 44 metre column being topped by a statue of Britannia (rather than Nelson) apparently gazing inland and westward towards his birthplace at Burnham Thorpe. Evidently Britannia is not an accomplished geographer since Burnham Thorpe is North West from here, but I’m sure she means well.
Great Yarmouth’s very own Nelson’s Column
I wonder what the land use for this area was in 1817, since it is unlikely that they would have stuck a monument to our greatest naval hero in the middle of an industrial complex.
The journey north along the coast takes us past Great Yarmouth’s Premiere Inn before we encounter what appears to be a large, bright blue, Martello tower. These were built at the time of the Napoleonic Wars that Nelson played such a major part in, but to my knowledge none were built this far north. In fact it is Yarmouth’s ‘Pleasure Beach’, with its acres of fun rides and other sick-inducing attractions.
As we cycle past the apparently lifeless edifice of the Pleasure Beach, which I assume is not currently operating due to Covid 19 restrictions, we can see acres of unoccupied sand which under normal circumstances (and perhaps a little earlier in the day) would attract thousands of holidaymakers. Between us and the sea is a large swathe of marram grass, suggesting that the sand is largely wind-blown in origin.
We quickly pass the Wellington Pier (yet another homage to our victory over Napoleon) and its Bowling Alley, The Sea Life Centre and The Winter Gardens, all of which attest to the popularity of Great Yarmouth as a holiday destination. The Winter Gardens is an amazing glass structure originally built at Torquay, but transferred to Great Yarmouth in 1904. Apparently it is the last surviving Victorian coastal Winter Gardens in the UK and is the subject of much debate about its restoration. The council has invited tenders from businesses, to repurpose it, supported by Heritage Lottery funding. I quite fancy a new greenhouse but I don’t think I could afford the rent.
Winter-Gardens
Feeling that we have probably cycled enough today, we decide to return to our car through a tree lined street flanked by opulent Victorian town houses. This reminds one of the wealth that could once have been gained by those investing in fishing, dock related industries and 19th century tourism in Yarmouth. Further away from the town centre the houses are much smaller and would have been occupied by the poorer working classes on whose backs the wealthy made their ‘millions’.
Our bikes loaded onto the bike rack, we head back to our caravan with leg muscles aching from their unaccustomed cycling use. Tomorrow we will employ slightly different muscles as we return to Great Yarmouth on the bus and attempt to walk up the coast to Winterton-on-Sea.
Back at the caravan- planning tomorrow