Norfolk is a region I have never been to before now, so this bank holiday we headed off in the motorhome to have a look around. Our original intention was to start the tour in the Great Yarmouth area and over the extended weekend work our way northwards along the coast, moving from one campsite to the next, and ending up around Wells-next-the-Sea.

I normally leave the booking of campsites until the week before only to find I have to do a bit more ringing around because our first choice sites have already booked up with the bank holiday crowds. So this time I decided to be premptive and began the process of booking sites 3 weeks ahead thinking this should give me plenty of time to beat the crowds. As it turned out, despite my foresight, I found suitable sites (read cheap) to be in even shorter supply than normal. I guess this must be an indication of the popularity of Norfolk. Consequently I had to resort to booking two sites in Suffolk which, although is a lovely part of the world, was going in the opposite direction to what we had planned.

The journey up to Norfolk went quite well, all the anticipated traffic holdups seemed to be in the opposite direction, one section of the M25 tailed back about 10 miles. We hit a slight bottleneck in the Elvedon forest but that only delayed us by about 15 minutes. The fine weather we had been promised didn't appear instead it began to drizzle. Given how bad the summer has been this year I began to wonder if this would turn out to be a typically wet bank holiday despite all predictions to the contrary.

Eventually we arrived at our first site in Burgh Castle, just outside Great Yarmouth, in good time for to go for a walk and explore the area. I brought some ordnance survey maps with me and could see there was the remains of a Roman fort nearby. I say nearby, because I estimated it was only about 1 mile away looking at the map and convinced my daughter that she could manage a 2 mile stroll. My estimate however turned out to be considerably short and in fact it was more like 1.75 miles. So what should have been a 2 mile walk became a 3.5 mile hike. Boy did I get some grief for that especially as a significant part of it was along narrow roads without pavements!

View from the Roman fort at Burgh Castle (Click all images for a larger view)

The next day the much anticipated, fine weather arrived and we headed down to Southwold in Suffolk and spent most of the day there. Southwold is quite an upmarket seaside resort notable for the lighthouse positioned amongst the residential houses. There is also a pier with a small amusement arcade, but apart from that Southwold does not have the usual, tacky paraphenalia associated with other seaside holiday resorts.

Southwold Lighthouse.

The Sole Bay Inn.

Southwold beach huts

We noticed that many of the towns and villages in East Anglia had some quite ornate and colourful name plaques. The most impressive of the ones we saw was at Beccles, this was a fully three dimensional scene of some event associated with the town. Unfortunately because I was trying to cope with my satnav system which at that point seemed determined to send me the wrong way down one way streets, I didn't manage to stop and take a photo. As an example of what I'm trying to describe, I have posted Southwold's name plaque below. This commemorates the battle of Sole Bay which took place in 1672 between the English and French navies on one side and the Dutch navy on the other. Yes you did read that correctly - the English and the French fighting on the same side. Isn't history fascinating? Although I did notice that in this depiction the French navy is conspicuous by it's absence, perhaps at this point in the battle it was lunchtime.

A scene from the battle of Sole Bay; 1672, around about lunch time

The Sunday was somewhat wasted as I didn't want to venture too far into Norfolk because we then had to travel back into Suffolk for that evening's campsite destination. This is where my attempt at forward planning didn't pan out.

In the morning we visited the Minsmere RSPB reserve. I didn't go in myself as birdwatching is what my wife Ali and Charlotte particularly like doing. The report back from Minsmere wasn't too impressive however. Although a Heron and a Marsh Harrier were spotted nothing else of particular interest had been observed.

Later on in the afternoon we visited How Hill. I wanted to have a look at the windpump there and in particular try and take a picture from the same vantage point as one that I particularly like by a photograher called Tom Mackie. I was never going to be able to emulate the image taken by Tom but I thought this might at least serve as a recce operation for the future. When we eventually found this place it turned out that it was not possible to reach the spot I wanted without a boat! I had to content myself with a much poorer image of the back of the windpump from the wrong side of the river. I haven't shown that one by the way, it's that bad. Mental note to self for the future - research locations more thouroughly. I have since read that Tom lives quite locally to How Hill and is on very friendly terms with the reed cutter there, so I presume that is how he manages to take his images from what turns out to be a very difficult place to get to. It just goes to show why the best landscape photographs are usually taken by the people who live closest to the scene.

Anyway the day wasn't a complete waste of time, after all what is a visit to Norfolk if you don't at least drove through the village with the stupidest name, in this case the award goes to Repps-with-Bastwick!!

On Monday we had to cram in all the places we had planned to take in the previous day starting with Horsey Windpump. We then spent a little time on the beach at Sea Palling where there are some impressive sea defences that have since become huge sand dunes. It struck me while there how similar to Holland Norfolk is. It's mostly flat, has loads of windmills (or more accurately; windpumps) and there are dykes to keep the sea out in some places.

Horsey Windpump

The next port of call on our whistle stop tour was Happisburgh lighthouse which is the only independantly owned, operational lighthouse in the UK. I noticed a for sale sign at the entrance to the road leading up to the lighthouse. I don't know if it is the land that is for sale or the lighthouse itself. The coast line around Happisburgh is rapidly being eroded and some of the houses there are only meters away from the cliff edge. Eventually the lighthouse itself will be threatened by falling into the sea. I wonder if the relationship between the decline in the value of a property and the distance it is from a rapidly eroding coastline is linear or exponential?

Happisburgh Lighthouse - New owner must leave lights on at night!

Cley-next-the-sea was the next village on the list and finally caught us up with our original schedule. The Norfolk wildlife trust have a particularly impressive visitors centre in which we found ample parking for a couple of hours while Ali and Charlotte went bird watching again and I scouted out the village with a view to researching possible future photo opportunities.

Cley windmill - Yes folks! It's a windmill this time, not a windpump.

The bird watching was far more fruitful than Minsmere by all accounts with reports of a multitude of different types of waders, ducks and geese being spotted by my "twitchers".

On Tuesday morning we had just enough time to drop in to Wells-next-the-Sea before heading home. There is a very picturesque beach to the north of the town which is enhanced by the chain of colourful huts lining the beach. I tried my hand at another panoramic which was slightly less successful than the previous day. Not having the tripod with me meant I was unable to maintain the horizontal pan line hence the two beach huts just right of centre touching the upper frame.

Wells-next-the-sea - Panoramic

More beach huts at Wells-next-the-Sea - Single frame

That pretty much wraps up the account of our Norfolk tour. We saw rather more of Suffolk than we had intended and I would have preferred to have spent more time on the Norfolk coast. The trip home wasn't quite as smooth as the outward journey either. I'd hoped that by leaving it until Tuesday to come home we could avoid the inevitable bank holiday traffic jams, but no, the good old M25 saw to that. It took at least an hour to get between junction 22 and 19!!

Oh well, at least I have some nice "snaps" to show for it all, and as I am constantly reminding my crew of two; "I always take you to the best places".