Broad Cottage

We used to have a place in The Broads. A small estate, comprising house (Broad Cottage), lake (Buckenham Broad) and tracts of swampy woodland (Buckenham Carrs). 

Buckenham Broad, by J.C. Harrison

Broad Cottage in 1957. 

As a boy, it was one one of my favourite places. There was a thatched boathouse connected to the Broad by a canal, equipped with two clinker-built rowing boats and a Canadian canoe hanging from the rafters; there were also fishing nets and wooden decoys hanging up. There was a thatched, wooden summerhouse on a sandy knoll. There was a marble statue of a naked lady holding a fish beside the jetty.  It was a place for adventures. The old, wicker bath-chair could be pressed into service for fast slalom runs down the drive, with a ducking in a canal at the end if the non-existent brakes failed. Mosquitoes were very bad; water mint was odorous; dragonflies were magnificent; herons were flapping pterodactyls.  

My father had a trout farm business based at Bibury in Gloucestershire, but used Broad Cottage as a source of coarse fish to stock river and lakes in East Anglia. He inherited the business off his uncle Oliver, who traded as The Weston Fishery, based at Weston Longville in the Wensum valley. It was the home of his grandmother and her youngest son Henry, known to me as Uncle Tony. When I knew him he was a smoky, beery, tweedy old gent with nicotine-stained fingers and a bad cough who was a regular at the Cantley Cock. 

The Weston Fishery, c.1950

We would set out in two boats piled with nets and followed by floating tanks. He cast his nets in a wide semi-circle across the Broad then we would slowly tighten them in towards the shore. Equipped with hand nets and wading boots he would sweep up the fish, checking species, sizing some and throwing them back, counting others before tossing them into the tanks; the pike he would throw over his shoulder into the bushes where they were left - callously in my opinion - to gasp and flap out their lives. We sometimes visited Hassingham Broad, where he had an agreement with the owner, It was reached via a connecting canal - more of a shady tunnel through thickets of carr. Another canal led to the River Yare. It emerged from the woods and tracked across grazing marshes, went under a railway bridge then joined the Yare. My father said that when he was a boy cinders from passing steam engines would plop into the water under the bridge with a shocking hiss. 

The situation at Broad Cottage today is sad. The house is no longer inhabited. The boathouse and summerhouse have vanished. If people don't reside in a place and care for it it soon falls apart. However, the wetlands, carrs and canals remain. Indeed, Buckenham Carrs has recently found fame as a roosting rendezvous for big flocks of rooks and jackdaws, featured in 'Crow Country' by Mark Cocker. This phenomenon was not mentioned when I was young, so perhaps it's recent. Also, it gladdens me to know that the site has become recognised as a rich hotspot for Broadland biodiversity - as recently published in 'The ecology and biodiversity of Buckenham Carrs', edited by Mark Collins of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Trust (#54,1 2021). 

Nature is an Heraclitean fire. The only constant is change. What endures are those memories which we carry with us - particularly the foundational ones of childhood - and more solid structures such as bricks and mortar, hillsides, valleys and the geological strata which hold them in place. Old cottages collapse and thatched boathouses are destroyed. The woods and waters survive. I have Broad Cottage squirreled away in the storied fabric of my boyhood memory, just as it was in my father's. It represents a sort of wild Eden which neither of us ever forgot. 

A shooting party, c.1950. Note thatched roof.
Second from left is Alan Savory,
author of 'Norfolk Fowler' and other books.

When Uncle Tony died in 1970 an era went with him, and Broad Cottage was sold. For some reason successive owners have not deepened their connection to the place; they have let it drift unoccupied, seemingly as some sort of unfulfilled, weekend project. 

It would be good if Broad Cottage could become a family home - a place with real meaning, and not just a venue for occasional shooting parties or for watching dusky rook armadas. Children need to run free there, explore the woods and wetlands and discover wonders. 

It would also make a wonderful nature study centre. 

Uncle Tony's grave at Hassingham.

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