See how it was all brilliant sunshine there? Well, most of the time it was more like this - flat light, damp and grey:
Once again there was pack ice floating on the salt waters of the estuary of the River Great Ouse. The seagulls were using it as a sort of playground:
That shot, like the next couple, was taken from West Lynn, a small village on the bank of the river opposite King's Lynn.
The only real purpose of West Lynn is to act as a photographic viewpoint for King's Lynn.
Enough dullness, back to the sunshine - this is a shot of All Saints church, the original (12th century?) foundation being the oldest in Lynn, now mostly 14th century, and showing the typical Lynn "chequerboard" style of alternating flint and stone blocks:
But All Saints isn't a patch, architecturally speaking, on St Nicholas':
You're probably a bit bored with churches, so here's a vaguely homoerotic sculpture above the door of one of the town's banks:
And here's that most iconic of Lynn buildings, the Customs House, by local architect Henry Bell ("the most perfect vernacular building in England", according to Pevsner):
There are cute details in the town too, like this beast on a Victorian shopfront:
But the real drama comes with the town's main church, St Margaret's, whose massive double-towered frontage dominates the old town (this is one of the largest non-cathedral churches in England):
St Margaret was, I think, a Turkish woman who was swallowed by a dragon (what is it with Turkey and dragons? Think St George...). But using her cross she burst out of the dragon's mouth, killing it. I rather liked the light on this bollard, which features the town's symbol:
Here's more of that trademark flint chequerboarding, this time on the medieval Trinity Guildhall:
Lynn was made, of course, by the river: here, looking out to sea, the massing of the town on the east bank contrasts with the "where is it?" non-massing of West Lynn on the, er, other bank:
A few chainsaw-carved sculptures have been scattered around an area of park/wasteland alongside the river: I like this one, a fisherman holding a boat hull on his head, celebrating Lynn's whaling and fishing history:
I loved the colours in these shots:
And this rather spoils the pastoral idyll: Lynn's newest factory, the largest paper mill in Europe, apparently, just beyond the lowest crossings of the Ouse:
Here the River Nar flows into the Ouse, West Lynn church on the opposite bank:
Not far from that is this, the only remaining part of Whitefriars, a Carmelite Friary extant from roughly 1250 until the dissolution of the sixteenth century. Apparently England's first biography was written by a friar here. Know what it is?
No, I didn't either. Apparently it's The Book of Margery Kempe, by Friar Aleyn.
In the late Medieval period Lynn was very prosperous indeed and built new town walls enclosing a huge unbuilt area as well as the town itself -- to give it room to grow. That growth didn't happen (at least, not until the 19th century), and the walls were undefendable (as was proved in the Civil War). But the remains are pretty enough:
You're on the home stretch now. Here's one of Lynn's other famous monuments, the Red Mount Chapel, a strange, hexagonal shaped building, on the pilgrimage route to Walsingham, famously used by Parliamentarians as a stable in the Civil War:
This is the trackbed of the old Lynn-Hunstanton railway, celebrated by Betjeman in a delightful BBC film, now a path:
And the final, generic, shot, to emphasise again just how bloody cold Norfolk was (and still is):
Let's end it there, drawing a veil over the assorted relatives and people-related incidents which are, I am sure, of even less interest to you than this over-extended set of snaps. Now, back to the cock.
4 comments:
Your great photos make me want to go and see your hell-hole! I was last there, ever so briefly, when Kings Lynn was transformed into an American port, New York?, for the filming of Revolution (I never did see the film.) It was grey then too.
Bedfordshire also uses the flint cheque-board on its old churches: the most prevalent of building materials in those days?
Ah, Revolution. What a dreadful film. Al Pacino, doing the American Revolution (and yes, Lynn was a stand-in for eighteenth century New York). Lynn has changed a lot since then, not all of it for the better (but some of it is).
Except for decorative highlights or for the really exceptionally wealthy, building materials (like stone) were almost always local. If you were lucky enough to live on Portland that meant you had very fine buildings, but in this part of Norfolk you had to make do with viciously hard flint. If you could afford a bit of stone, you often made it go further by intermingling it with the local materials.
Later, the flint tended to be used as bulk infill with brick borders (the universal use of bricks came with the railways when it became economic to transport them large distances, and Lynn made use of the massive brickworks at Peterborough).
Later still, local building materials were dropped altogether in favour of cheap, industrially-produced bricks (see the Norfolk railway village of Melton Constable, built by the railway as their engineering works in the middle of Norfolk using bricks imported from the other end of their line. It looks like nothing else in the county).
There are several biographies of English people much earlier than Margery Kempe; eg Bede's Life of Cuthbert (C8); Walter Daniel's ditto of Aelred (C11).
In any case, Margery Kempe claims to be autobiography (written in apparently 1st person, though it could be argued it isn't). Friar A might have been her amanuensis, perhaps. I can't remember (and can't find my copy) but as she died c1430 she's much much later than Cuthbert or Aelred (and probably many others).
It might I suppose lay claim to be the first biography *written* in English; but I suspect that would be disputed on two grounds (a) it's not really English but Middle English or some such; (b) there are others, which I can't list offhand, but I'm sure exist (argument weak here, so shut up).
BTW I keep being invited to "type the characters" when none are displayed. Irritating.
Viollet: you're quite right, extraordinarily rubbishy writing on my part -- it was the first biography in the English language. Written c.1440, or about half a century after Chaucer, I think we have to accept that Middle English is, to all intents and purposes, English, don't we? Or, at least, we did when I was reading it at school. Do they still teach Chaucer in schools?
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