Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 134
A Nature Book Reader
JANE WHEELER
Caught By The River reader
Summer In Broadland
by Henry Montagu Doughty
A prolonged tour of
the Norfolk Broads in a
converted wherry in 1889;
a loving description of a
world long past. Wherries
were the sailing barges of the
Norfolk waterways, already
suffering from competition
from the railways.
Gipsy’s voyage through
the broads is an indulgent,
leisurely, and entirely
benign passage through a
wetland landscape of reed
fen, dyke, woodland, lakes,
choked with weed or open
to the elements, full of
fish, birds, and characters
- eel catchers, reed cutters,
working wherrymen,
poor tenant farmers,
gamekeepers. Already the
waterfowler and the egg
and bird collector had
wiped out the bittern and
the ruff.
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The joys and vicissitudes
of sailing are fully described;
Gipsy penetrated far further
than is possible now, as far
as Aylsham up the Bure,
past Geldeston Lock and
Ellingham Mill to Bungay,
through Hickling broad and
on past Horsey to Waxham,
and then in a smaller boat up
the canalised Thurne river to
its starting point where the flat
farmland is only divided from
the sea by a line of sand dunes.
This is a book which
connects with contemporary
writing about wild places in
our own countryside; Roger
Deakin would have enjoyed
it, I think, and some now
dead members of my own
family, who adored these
waters, sailed them, fished
them, wrote about them, and
tried to defend them from the
modern age.
