Description
Maritime Norfolk Part One is the first part of a lifetime’s enthusiam and research for the foremost of East Anglia’s writers on maritime topics. Robert Malster ventured to sea on a shrimper in the Wash, on a drifter out of Yarmouth, talked with longshore fishermen and beachmen, pored over local newspapers and documents in the Record Office and brings his decades of reasearch together in the 272 pages of this volume. This volume is the first of two parts; it deals with the Norfolk coast from Wisbech and Kings Lynn to Caister. The second part, Maritime Norfolk Part Two, dealing specifically with Great Yarmouth, has also now been published.
In this first part of a two volume publication Malster writes about life and activity on the Norfolk coastline from the Wash in the west to Caister in the east of the county, with a second volume being required to tell the story of the port of Great Yarmouth. Wisbech and Hunstanton and Wells, Cromer and Sheringham, all feature with their own facilities, idiosyncrasies and specialisations, with many other smaller communities coming into the story. Cley and Blakeney, now homes to modest scale vessels for the leisure sailor are recalled as significant ports in the past; the lives of the beachmen who made their living from wreck and rescue are introduced and a comprehensive bibliography points on to many other titles which will interest those who love the county, the wider region of East Anglia and who simply enjoy tales of the sea.
There is also a section on the Broadland waterways, so that we can appreciate the link between the maritime acitivity and the trade that made its way inland. Indded, from earliest times we might regard the great estuary inland to Norwich as the coastline, and it is only in more recent times that it has become rivers rather than the sea.
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