River places in past and future Norfolk
In Climate Museum UK, we have been collecting Extreme Weather Stories, with an invitation to submit accounts of experience, science, artistic response or opinion. We’re open to diverse approaches. We’re also developing a programme (as yet unfunded) exploring the heritage of river landscapes and urban settlements in context of climate change. I’ve been doing some personal thinking about this in creative ways.
I spent Christmas staying in the penthouse flat above Groundwork Gallery — a wonderful environmental art gallery in Kings Lynn. I was there for a solo self-organised creative retreat.
- Here are photos of the drawings, paintings and collages I made
- Here are my photos from daily walks
- And below is a visual poem I wrote — Hope in this Mirescape.
I was thinking about threatened historic landscapes in this rapidly worsening climate, such as the historic town centre of Kings Lynn and the wider Fens environment. My thoughts were ranging around the role of ‘magical thinking’ in the past, where fishing folk performed symbolic actions and stories to assuage the sea fairies, to quell the dangerous seas and storms. For example, Kings Lynn female loved-ones would go to the quay when the boats departed and when they returned on the high tide. They carried with them their house keys, and turned these in an outward motion on the outward journey, and inward on their return, keeping an invisible connection with those at sea.
I was also reading about the archaeology of the landscape — in ‘The Fens’ by Francis Pryor — and was interested in the discoveries of the origins of livestock farming around 3700 BC. And I also read ‘Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens’ by James Boyce, which details the almost comprehensive enclosure and conversion of the Fens into a breadbasket for the UK. The Fens now account for about half of the UK’s most productive agricultural land. He describes the resistance by Fens dwellers (Fen Tigers), who wanted to protect as much as possible of wilder land for foraging for their traditional diet of eels, fish and wildfowl, as well as access to materials such as reeds. So there is a conundrum in relation to time here — that livestock farming and grain cultivation (minimally) began 5700 years ago but also that there was a fight to protect what enabled a forager economy from 1450–1850. People needed the sovereignty of access to land, as indigenous stewards, and to supplement their diet.
The other key issue was — and still is — the damage to the natural management of ‘mirescape’ that was caused by drainage and shrinkage of the land below the level of sea and rivers. This winter, including today, there are flood warnings from heavy and persistent rain. Fields and roads in many places across Norfolk are flooded. There are dire warnings from climate scientists about current escalation of warming indicators, and extreme weather is likely to be, well, extreme this year to come, and it will only get worse in years and decades to come.
So, I wrote this poem ‘Hope in this Mirescape’. And below, see another visual poem ‘Silt and Flow’ that I wrote about the River Yare between Great Yarmouth and Norwich.
Silt and Flow is ‘a tale of two cities and of the river between; of people, things and time; and of these troubled times’. It takes some time to express the modern history of the River Yare, in a rather fast-flowing yet meandering way, and then at the end looks forward into the uncertain future.
My next plan is to write a similar poem about Ely, which I visited last week, and to keep going in this exploration of the history of rivers and threatened coastal and riverine landscapes. Also, I’m well aware I need to write out screen-reader-friendly texts.
