Holiday VII: St Benet's Abbey and the Ranworth Rood Screen

   On the final full day of our holiday we went west into the Broads.  We parked up at the rather suburban looking South Walsham Broad and walked along the Fleet Dike to see the ruins of St Benet's Abbey.  The remains of abbey were a favourite with Romantic artists such as Cotman, and were included in John Betjeman's 1974 documentary, 'A Passion For Churches', which was as much about Norfolk as it was the diocese of Norwich. (Produced and directed by Edward Mirzoeff, who was also responsible for Betjeman's 'Metro-land' of 1973.) Quite good reasons then for a long, cold muddy trek into the marshes!

     "I hear a deep sad undertow in bells which calls the Middle Ages back to me. From Prime to Compline the monastic hours echo in bells along the windy marsh and fade away. They leave me to the ghosts which seem to look from this enormous sky upon the ruins of a grandeur gone. St Benet's Abbey by the river Bure, now but an arch way and a Georgian mill. A lone memorial of the cloistered life."

   We then stopped off at the 'Fairhaven Woodland and Water Gardens', the creation of Major Henry Boughton.  Major Boughton was the younger brother of the 1st Lord Fairhaven, who lived at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire mentioned elsewhere in this blog and where the bf works.

   Our final visit of the day was to Ranworth and one of the great pieces of English late Medieval art, the Ranworth Rood Screen.  I'm tempted to call it a prime example, along with the Despencer Retable, of the 1st Norwich School; certainly it was painted locally.  The importance lies not only in its design but that so many of the painted panels survived the Reformation in such good nick.  A marvel.

Holiday III Great Yarmouth

   A bitterly cold day, as I remember it, with occasional heavy showers.  A day in which I was never quite warm or dry; or so I remember it.  We started the day with a walk to the beach to watch the seals - it was calving season and there were plenty of white pups about.  After breakfast we drove south through sprawling seaside development to....well, firstly the scanty remains of the Roman fort at Caister on Sea, and then to the later fortifications at Caister Castle, the home of Sir John Falstoff (one time owner of Blickling, and model for Falstaff in 'Henry V')

   And then Great Yarmouth, a bustling port and seaside resort, with a down-at-heal air.  Architecturally there is a lot to see - the heart of the town is, or was Medieval, and there are Georgian merchants houses lining the quayside.  There is an enormous Market Place, and an incredible, severest Neo-Classical honorific column erected to commemorate one of Britain's greatest military heroes Admiral Lord Nelson. But like the majority of Britain's larger towns the 20th & 21st centuries have been unkind. Yarmouth was bombed in the last War, and then underwent a series of, perhaps, well meant redevelopments that have scarred the ancient core of the town.  It must have been very beautiful at one time, alas a lot of the historic properties, particularly the mighty houses on South Quay were in semi derelict condition.  The one bright spot was the former St George's church which had been derelict for some time and has now found a new lease of life as a theatre.  One of the reasons I wanted to visit was to pay a return visit to the ancient parish church, St Nicholas, but more of that in my next post. 

   Being a seaside town we had walk along the prom, eat fish and chips (very good) and buy rock.  We really had to.  Really. There was good early Victorian architecture in places too along the prom, in what is in effect a separate town.

White Horse Plain

Houses on Church Plain

The Fisherman's Almshouses (1702) on Church Plain

The Tolhouse

St George, St George's Plain

   That evening we watched 'Les Biches' a film by Claude Chabrol, starring his wife Stephane Audran.  The reason for watching this for me was Audran; I have been quietly fascinated by her for years.  I first remember seeing her in Granda TV's superlative adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited' where she played Lord Marchmain's mistress 'Cara'.  I next saw her in 'Babette's Feast'.  Audran possessed a remarkable and striking beauty, and an almost other-worldly acting style.  Her performance in this film did not disappoint either; written by her husband and Paul Gegauf it is the story of a strange, disturbing relationship between Frederique (Audran), the younger enigmatic Why (Jacqueline Sassard) and the architect Paul Thomas played by Jean-Louis Trintignant.  The film itself had this slightly distanced feel hard to capture in words.  Initially set in Paris, where the stylish, dominant  Frederique picks up Why on the Pont des Arts, things begin to go awry when Frederique brings the younger, seemingly ingenue, woman south with her to her villa in Provence where they encounter Paul and a sort of three way relationship develops.  The denouement, a 'sort of denouement' really as it throws up all sorts of questions, occurs back in Paris.

Les Biches

1968

Producer                Andres Genoves
Director                  Claude Chabrol
Cinematographer  Jean Rabier

Holiday II

   We finally arrived in Horsey mid-afternoon.  It was all very still, very calm and very damp.  Before we actually moved into our holiday cottage we stopped on the edge of the village to look the National Trust pumping mill (alas, the sails need replacing!) and walk around Horsey Mere.  It got more atmospheric as evening approached - though not at all eerie.  Just a sense of emptiness - all very Northern European, as though we were part of a painting by David Caspar Friedrich. Exquisite.

Holiday I

  Back in this post to the holiday the bf and I took on the Norfolk Broads last month - actually it seems an age ago....actually it was just over a month ago!  On the way we stopped off for lunch in the small Norfolk market town of Wymondham, where there was a 'farmers market' (really good cakes).  I wanted to show the bf the abbey with its two towers and the amazing object it contains...

   As you can see they are doing some major work at the east end of the nave.  And this is the amazing object...a reredos by Sir John Ninian Comper, designed and erected between the Wars as memorial to the men from Wymondham killed in action, a schematic representation of the Day of Judgement.

   The Abbey itself is a magnificent building, but is, I guess, pretty unknown.  It has a couple of spectacular medieval roofs, and all sorts of interesting fittings, like the Early Tudor monument (to the right of the reredos), made of terracotta.  The lovely font cover was designed in the 1950s by (I think) Cecil Upcher.

  

   Wymondham has some lovely old streets and also this Baroque town house (Gaius House)