The East Coast of East Anglia

 

Having covered most of the North of the county of Norfolk earlier in the week, today we decided to travel along the East Coast. The journey from Yaxham to Great Yarmouth travels through the Norfolk Broads, a pretty place which is probably more photogenic from the water than from the road. 

The route today looked like this:

Great Yarmouth

Having got up as usual at 5.30am I had breakfast, caught up with the latest online Mass Bookings for St. Teilo’s tonight and tomorrow, forwarded them to a friend to print and then showered, shaved etc. in time to leave at 8am. 

I had hoped to leave early to miss most of the traffic. Well, we got to Great Yarmouth by 8:50am, very good time, and as Drew’s photos shows it wasn’t very busy!! i.e. we were the only car in the car park.

Car Park on arrival

Same shot on departure

We strolled around the front loving the retro feel of the seaside resort, like a cheaper version of Blackpool. The town seemed to live on its 1950s history with lots of posters from that era along the seaside.

It also seems to have ambitions to be a Las Vegas, it isn’t by a long way. This includes a Circus Circus, Flamingo and Golden Nugget!! [Co-pilot's note: Oi, you forgot Caeser's Palace!!]

We strolled around the streets in the area waiting for the Time and Tides Museum to open at 10am and were surprised by two pieces of history. The first is a house which is the first place in the UK to have someone killed through being hit by aerial bombardment, from a Zeppelin in World War 1!

The second was the Great Yarmouth Walls. I’d surprised I’d not heard of them as these walls are well preserved at places (compared say to Swansea where all the stone from the walls were taken as building materials and Cardiff where the walls are marked with floor tiles as so little remains.)

Time and Tide Museum

The Time and Tide Museum is focussed on the history of the Herring Industry in Great Yarmouth with its impact on the town being significant. The Museum is housed in a former Curing Works where the herring were smoked or pickled and packed for dispatch across the UK and the empire. 

The museum highlights memories of when Bloater paste was regarded as the height of civilisation – Agatha Christie, who may not have been a fan, uses it to kill someone in one of her books. 

The museum is also full of interesting facts about the area. In Roman times what is now Great Yarmouth was still underwater as it had been since the end of the ice age. Sand banks were in the area which gradually formed larger collections of sand and other materials until what is now Great Yarmouth became a habitable place – being given a charter in 1207 by our old friend King John, who seems to have been very engaged with this part of his kingdom.

The museum also has a simulation of life in the narrow Yarmouth streets in the early parts of the last century. Some of the manikins being so real that one person who visited the ‘street’ before us told us to be careful as they look alive. Drew thought he was going into the Doctor Who story about the Autons!! [Co-pilot's note: Spearhead from Space is a classic.] But though the manikins were well constructed and situated they didn’t actually scare us. 

Great Yarmouth Town

Having visited the museum we walked up into the town centre which, it being Saturday, was quite busy. We went for a coffee in a Costa and used their wifi to upload yesterday’s blog post, as internet access was nil this morning at Wagtail Barn.

The market in Great Yarmouth, built on the same site as the one mentioned in King John’s charter is lively, but a large proportion of it has been demolished to make way for a new market building that is only just beginning. 

Great Yarmouth Minster

At the end of the market, we came to Great Yarmouth Minster, dedicated to St. Nicholas. This Church has an interesting history. Founded by the First Bishop of Norwich as a Priory and Church, the Church itself survived when the Priory was closed. A little of the history of this Bishop on the walls of the Church makes for fun reading. He bought himself the Bishopric, moving it from the Saxon location in Thetford to Norwich as Norwich was the emerging great town in Norman Norfolk. The Bishop Herbert de Losinga, who also bought his father the Abbey of Winchester, recognised that his purchase of the Bishopric of Thetford was committing the sin of simony, buying Church office, so travelled to Rome to ask for forgiveness and received it from Pope Urban II. With that Papal Authority he moved the see from Thetford to Norwich, but also as penance established a large number of new churches and priorys including this one in Great Yarmouth and the one in Kings’ Lynn that we visited a few days ago.

Black Beauty

The third of the facts of Great Yarmouth that came as a surprise to us was the Anna Sewell, the author of Black Beauty, was born in the town in 1820. This information led us to sing bursts of the Black Beauty TV theme tune on and off for the rest of the day. 

We walked back to the, now full (see photo above), car park with a large crowd now on the seafront, eating fish and chips, playing slot machines and riding the fairground rides. 

Admiral Nelson

Great Yarmouth was also the home of Horatio Nelson, who joined the fleet there, and he is celebrated in the town with street names for himself and some of his famous battles but also by a large column. Unlike Nelson’s Column in London, however, he is not at the top of this column, but detailed in the items at the bottom of the plinth which carries the image of Britannia.

Drew was pleased to get to the column as it was the only thing he knew about Great Yarmouth until today. He was somewhat disappointed that the Nelson Museum closed in 2019 due to lack of interest or visitors. He was also not pleased that Nelson’s Column was in the middle of an industrial estate, he felt the setting really wasn’t prominent for the great seaman.

 

Lowestoft

We left Great Yarmouth at 1.35pm and travelled from Norfolk to Suffolk to the port of Lowestoft. We started our visit to the town, a lot quieter and somewhat more refined than Great Yarmouth, at the Most Easterly Point in the UK, the first to see the sun. Having stayed in the most Easterly town in Canada and visited the very well-developed site of the most Southerly point in the contiguous (i.e. mainland) USA (Key West) we were surprised that a little more wasn’t made of this site in the UK. There is a single circular stone and plaque with the purpose of the location spelt out and then a list of places which are a particular distance from it. In particular we noted that Cardiff is 224 miles away, and the places we might have been this summer (or last) if it hadn’t been for Covid were also included with Stockholm (788), Copenhagen (491) and Amsterdam (133) all named. 

Just as the marker had reminded me of our holiday in Key West, so the small pier which led from it reminded me of another holiday in Cuba, when Drew played avoid the wave on the Malecon in Havana. This location however didn’t encourage him to repeat the occasion as it was hot and sunny in Havana, and cold and damp in Lowestoft. So, we photographed the tide wash over the end of the pier but didn’t walk along it for fear of being washed away.

Lowestoft High Street

Lowestoft is very proud of its old High Street, about a mile from the current town centre, which has ancient houses and stores from the era when the fishing port was the source of all its wealth in the 1800s. I was happy to see a Post Office so I could buy some stamps for my postcards, but sadly, like most of the rest of the High Street, it wasn’t open on a Saturday. The High Street led up to the Lowestoft Lighthouse, which is still in use. The Lighthouse was another reminder of Key West, as like the lighthouse there, this one seems to be more inland than one would expect for it to be useful. The one in Key West is directly opposite Ernest Hemingway’s former home [Co-pilot's note: I dear readers am betting among yourselves how many comparisons have been made between Cuba/Key West and Lowestoft!!].

We walked back down the High Street and into the town centre, the Post Office here closes at two on a Saturday, so no cards will be posted until Monday! We left Lowestoft at 3:15pm

Southwold

My sister had mentioned that Southwold was a very pretty town which she and her husband had visited in the past. With them in mind we drove down to Southwold and visited the Pier there arriving at 3:45pm. 

Southwold is a lovely resort town with a very different feel from the cheap glitziness of Great Yarmouth or the larger resort of Cromer which seems set for family holidays. It has a tasteful, decorous, nature as shown both by its well-kept beach, complete with its own RNLI lifeguard, someone we might not have noticed if Twitter hadn’t been full of Farage and the RNLI over the last week and golden sand. 

The colourful beach huts also set Southwold apart. Though there are beach huts in Great Yarmouth and Cromer, the ones in Southwold look well kept and cared for, which was less evident in the other places.

The Pier is also nicely down, unlike the Great Yarmouth Pier which is full of amusement arcades and end of pier shows the Southwold Pier always for a lovely walk over the sea to look back on the town itself. A lovely refreshing way to bring an end to the afternoon.   

We left Southwold at 4:30pm and headed back to our holiday home arriving just after 5:30pm.

Bedding and Towels

Today being a week since we arrived in Yaxham, wow how quickly that has gone by, when we got back this afternoon the owners, who themselves had just returned from somewhere, came across to the barn with new bed clothes and fresh towels for our second week. We stripped the bed and remade it and replaced the towels before dropping all the used ones back to the owners in their home, Boundary House.

Benedict’s

At 6:15pm it was time to travel to Norwich for tonight’s dinner at Benedict’s (note to self, he doesn't use the apostrophe, I find it hard not to!) which is named for the street in which it is located – St. Benedict’s Street.

Richard Bainbridge who won Great British Menu in 2015 and competed again as a Guest chef in last Christmas Great British Christmas Menu competition has always been a favourite of ours. His inventive take on traditional British food is a model for the kind of food we love. So, we had booked his restaurant as soon as we began to plan our holiday in this part of the country. We were not disappointed. 

Benedict’s is a simple concept, there is a five-course menu or an eight-course menu (plus an equivalent of each for vegetarians). We opted for the eight-course menu, as should come as no surprise to regular readers of the blog! The food, both in titles and in taste, was exceptional. 

We began with ‘The Tease’ which was made up of three little tasters. BBQ Pork Ball, a Cheese Gougeres and a Prawn Cocktail Tartlet. The BBQ Pork Balls had an elderflower gel on top and underneath (to help them not roll off the plate) they were delicious, the warm tasty pork was complimented well by the sharp kick of elderflower, a great way to start. The Gougeres was a lovely strong rectangle of choux pastry with a big hit of parmesan (or similar) – the taste buds really began to sing at this point. The prawn was on the loveliest flaky pastry I have ever tasted and the delicious flavour of the prawns were enhanced with a spice like paprika or something very similar which added to the zing it gave as it refreshed the palate.

Second came ‘Aperitif’ which is a rice cracker with burnt onion powder sprinkled over it and with salmon roe on top, this was designed to be dipped in a sherry mousse. The cracker tingled on the tongue like a super high quality prawn cracker, the powder makes the tingle into a spiky rice taste and the salmon roe was like little pearls of salty deliciousness which popped as you eat the cracker to reveal its full flavour. The sherry mousse was to much of a memory of having to drink sherry at Christmas’ past to be exactly the right flavour for me. The cracker was more appetising to me than the taste of the sherry, it wasn’t unpleasant, but it was outshone by the cracker and its powder and roe.

Third came what was called ‘Benedicts Glazed Parker House Bread' served with wildflower butter. The bread and butter were served on a, I assume, custom made board two thirds marble (for the bread) and one third wood (for the butter, this was impressive enough, but what was on the board was even more impressive. The bread was light fluffy and steaming as we cut into it and soaked up the butter all to quickly. The butter was astonishing! There is no other word for it. I didn’t think I was eating butter, rather that I was luxuriating in a summer garden with the smell and taste of marigolds and other English garden flavours. I think if I had had another five or six portions of this, I wouldn’t have got over the deliciousness of the floral butter on the warm and succulent bread. The waitress told us that the flowers were from Richard’s own garden, but flowers alone wouldn’t be enough to make a taste like this, that must be due to a bit of chefy genius too.

Next came what was called a ‘Norfolk Pea Tart’ which was quite like what it was called. A tiny tartlet of light crispy pastry, like filo or wanton pastry, with tiny sweet fresh Norfolk peas, accompanied with a surprisingly cod rich flavour from the cod roe and caviar all brought together by a tart topping of white chocolate. Yes, you read that right. A little star of white chocolate was on top and I was dubious how it would work with the other flavours. But I should have learnt by now to trust the chef. The flavours of the chocolate balanced the pea sweetness and the saltiness of the caviar to absolute perfection.

By this time, we were thinking that the meal couldn’t get any better, with such wonderful delights, but they kept on coming. The next course, called ‘English Tomatoes’ was tomatoes and fresh basil wrapped in a whey as if it was a pasta or small piece of bread. This was accompanied by a sharp nasturtiums’ pesto, which was quite a surprise along with another quenelle that had a light red chilli flavour. The flavours of these things together would be enough of a treat to satisfy most people, but the addition of a Comte cheese mousse poured over the top raised the flavour a whole stratosphere higher. I did my best to mop up all the cheese mousse, but if I hadn’t been in such a public place, I think I would have picked the plate up and licked it as I didn’t want to miss any of the amazing flavour. 

Next in the meal was the ‘Cromer Crab’ which was served like a quiche, with a light base with brown and white crab on top of it with some crisp samphire. This was served with grapefruit pearls on top, adding an unusual but welcome sharpness with the crab and a charred piece of pink grapefruit on the side to act as a refreshing flavour alongside the rich crab. 

At this point we come on to the main course, here there was an element of choice, and this worked well for us. Last night I had Sea Bass for my meal and Drew had Duck, as these were the two dishes on offer for the main course, we opted to reverse the order from the night before. 

I have the Creedy Carver Duck with roscoff onion, a wild plum sauce, two pieces of sweet nori and some Norfolk new potatoes. The duck was exceptional in flavour, it had a smokiness that I didn’t expect initially which added a complexity to its flavour. I asked one of the staff after the course and he explained that it was cooked as a whole duck in a Grizzly oven giving it that smoky flavour. I know I’m a chatty person [Co-pilot's note: Realllly, we never would have guessed, dear readers, would we!!!], but for the duration of this part of the meal I was quiet as I let me mouth delight in the wonders going on inside it.

Drew opted for the Cornish Wild Sea Bass with braised baby gem lettuce and a lemon and lobster bisque and roe on top. The amazingly crisp skin on the fish was accentuated by the lobster and lemon bisque and the lettuce was charred to perfection giving it an extra dimension of flavour. Overall a real success. 

After the main course we had a surprise. We had noted that the Five Course menu included an optional cheese course, but there was no mention of it on the Eight Course menu, however it was offered to us and we accepted. The lady serving us asked if we would like a plate to share – we declined knowing that we are both cheese lovers and not wanting to start rowing over who had had most!! [Co-pilot's note: Just go with it, dear reader, just go with it!]

There were five delicious cheeses which were introduced to us, but with all the servers wearing masks I didn’t get all the names. The first (right of the picture) was a cheddar like cheese but not from cheddar, it was quite mature and the cheese reflected that added flavour. The second was a brie like cheese at the perfect point in its life cycle, i.e. almost ready to walk across the plate, it was delicious. The third cheese was a goat’s cheese, soft and subtle, but with all the poignant sharpness that goats milk produces in a cheese. The fourth was a blue cheese, softer than a stilton, but harder than a Danish blue. It was well veined which is always a good sign for a strong flavour, and this certainly had such a flavour. Finally, was a hard cheese similar in texture to French Comte, a strong finish to a delightful plate. The cheese was served with frozen grapes, this was a first for me never eating grapes frozen. A novel idea, but a great one. The grapes tasted like soft sweets chewy, rather than wet and runny, with a perfect ability to cleanse the palate after one cheese ready for the next. The chef served the cheese with sourdough crackers. You will have heard me say earlier in the blog posts for this holiday how much I have come to like sourdough over the periods of lockdown, but we have never managed to make sourdough crackers as the liveliness of the sourdough tends to make them rise. These were rich in sourdough flavour yet perfectly flat. They would be wonderful on their own but worked really well with the cheese too. After the disappointment I had last night with a cheese board, what a difference a few hundred yards, and a great chef, make to having cheese as a real delight.

Following the cheese course came the two desserts. The first another tiny tartlet was of gooseberry with an elderflower and ginger sorbet on top. This was a one bite special, but the sharpness of the gooseberry and the fineness of the pastry were excellent and the elderflower and ginger was a background flavour not overpowering the star of the show. We were so keen on this when it came that both were eaten before the camera could be deployed, so you have a photo of an empty plate after the event.

Finally came a British Summer Trifle with rose, strawberries and raspberries which was served alongside meringue. The trifle was perfect for me, not to sweet but full of lovely flavours. The idea of rose as the main flavour was inspired. Drew did eat my meringue for me, as that would have been far too sweet for my taste. 

Finally (notice two finallies in this post) we had an espresso each served with petit fours – which were an apple jelly, French pastry macaroon and a chocolate tart with lavender – all three (I mean six) were a delight for Drew. 

We finished the meal just after 10pm and got back to the Barn by 10:40pm in bed by 11:00pm, a late night by our standards, but well worth it for such a delightful meal.