Castle Aching

[phil_sutters]

The S&DJR's Bristol Channel ferry service used paddle steamers. It was never a huge success despite its high aspirations. Sherbro was the final ship in the passenger fleet and only lasted four years - the Severn Tunnel being the final nail in the coffin.

[wagonman]

 

As I typed, I had in mind a sort of purple-prosed paean to the delights of the district, inspired by the chap who sort of invented and popularised 'poppy land' (the place in north Norfolk once served by the M&GN, not the place in Kingsman where Elton John is held captive by an insane heroin-queen, in case that was unclear), but it almost immediately struck me that In the Shadow of the Keep could also be the title of an historical novel, probably medieaval in setting, in the impenetrably turgid style of Sir Walter Scott.  If so, anyone who has actually read Scott, or tried to, would instantly sympathise with the modern reader of In the Shadow of the Keep.

 

 

 

Ah yes, Clement Scott, purveyor of turgid doggerel to the gullible Telegraph-reading classes. He did have quite an impact BC (Beyond Cromer).

[Andy Hayter]

The S&DJR's Bristol Channel ferry service used paddle steamers. It was never a huge success despite its high aspirations. Sherbro was the final ship in the passenger fleet and only lasted four years - the Severn Tunnel being the final nail in the coffin.

Sherbro 1884 - 1888.jpg

 

fascinating - if only in the fact that I had never considered Somerset and Dorset as shire counties,

[Poggy1165]

I wish I could remember the name of the rather snobby bloke who wrote about Norfolk and coined the name "Sea Appalling" for Sea Palling. Years back when I was a relatively frequent visitor to Norfolk (a place I have loved since my youth) I read a fair few of his books and found them wryly amusing in an odd sort of way.

 

His repeated theme was that Norfolk had been wonderful back in the day (probably about 1890) but was now ruined by crowds of plebs. Probably the sort who wore knotted hankies on their heads.

[Edwardian]

 

His repeated theme was that Norfolk had been wonderful back in the day (probably about 1890) but was now ruined by crowds of plebs. Probably the sort who wore knotted hankies on their heads.

 

Well, Hunstanton is the resort of choice for many ....

[Nearholmer]

Edwardian

 

I’ve got lost in the thread.

 

Do you know where the route map, and the track diagrams for Wolfringham Harbour are?

 

Or, did I hallucinate drawing them?

 

The need for a concordance grows ever more pressing!

 

Kevin

Edited May 26, 2018 by Nearholmer

[Edwardian]

Edwardian

 

I’ve got lost in the thread.

 

Do you know where the route map, and the track diagrams for Wolfringham Harbour are?

 

Or, did I hallucinate drawing them?

 

The need for a concordance grows ever more pressing!

 

Kevin

 

I had thought you had drawn a track plan, but the links compiled for post #9993 (did I really just type 9993?!?) above was all I could find.

[Edwardian]

Edwardian

 

I’ve got lost in the thread.

 

Do you know where the route map, and the track diagrams for Wolfringham Harbour are?

 

Or, did I hallucinate drawing them?

 

The need for a concordance grows ever more pressing!

 

Kevin

 

 

Aha!

 

http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/107713-castle-aching/?p=2701128

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 26, 2018 by Edwardian

[TheQ]

I’ve only been to Wroxham once, but I think that when people talk of the place being full of the walking dead, they mean that figuratively, not literally ..... don’t they?

Many think they have been to Wroxham, most have not. If you go to the area where the big signs say Roy's of Wroxham, where all the tourist gather, or arrive at Wroxham and Hoveton Station, or at Wroxham Model worlds, you are not in Wroxham.

 

For Wroxham is south of the river, in Broadland district and is truly zombie land, a commuter town, where the more expensive houses are.

 

North of the River is Hoveton in North Norfolk district, where all most all the businesses and shops are, most of the boat yards, all the takeaways, the industrial park.

 

So I believe this is part of the cover-up hiding the reports of zombie land...

 

Ps Roy's of Wroxham never had a shop in Wroxham in their 123 year history, until a couple of years back when they bought a petrol station on Wroxham southern borders.

[Nearholmer]

Thank you both.

 

Having commuted for 40 years, I too was a zombie sometimes. I’m in remission since ceasing to commute.

 

1167 and 3253.

 

I’ll have to at a Plan for Shepherd’s Port later.

 

I’m beginning to think that the NMR ran mainly on higher ground, along the shoulder of the sandstone hills, and was linked to Wolfringham Harbour by a rope-worked incline and a causeway across the bog, with its own locos confined to the upper section. The trouble with mineral railways is that they were not recorded very well.

[Edwardian]

Thank you both.

 

Having commuted for 40 years, I too was a zombie sometimes. I’m in remission since ceasing to commute.

 

1167 and 3253.

 

I’ll have to at a Plan for Shepherd’s Port later.

 

I’m beginning to think that the NMR ran mainly on higher ground, along the shoulder of the sandstone hills, and was linked to Wolfringham Harbour by a rope-worked incline and a causeway across the bog, with its own locos confined to the upper section. The trouble with mineral railways is that they were not recorded very well.

 

Quite liked the idea of NMR locos running into Wolfringham Staithe, meeting WN locos. It seems to me that the WNR would undertake any work to the NMR railway locos that its own modest workshop couldn't handle.

 

EDIT:  Perhaps when the line was horse-worked there was an incline.  With the introduction of steam traction, a longer, gentler, route down was engineered, allowing the whole line to be loco-worked?

Edited May 26, 2018 by Edwardian

[Nearholmer]

And, a faintly plausible reason for exporting Carr stone, which I don't think anyone ever bothered to do in reality, might be that it could be used as ballast in returning colliers, which explains the little-known clutch of Carr stone houses near the Tyne.

 

By stretching the geology, we can have coprolite beds intermingled with the stone, as they are slightly further south in the same belt of greensands, and the coprolites can leave by rail or sail.

 

The NMR really ought to be an utterly impoverished outfit, one that suffers periodic closures, before staggering to a complete halt, at which time everything is just left, engines in shed, wagons in sidings etc, for the next boom, which never comes. Think West Somerset Mineral Railway and Edge Hill Light Railway.

 

Maybe the NMR is having one of its "flash in the pan" revivals in 1905, perhaps in connection with attempt to smelt Carr stone to extract the iron from, as was tried in a few places ...... Edwardian doubtless knows.

[Nearholmer]

Ah, yes, the zig-zag route that was built in the 1890s; I'd forgotten that.

[Northroader]

Cograttyfellations, Kevin, I see you’re the one who made the milepost on the history of the WNR, etc., 10000th post!!! Yeah, high five, man, etc.

[runs as required]

 

Edwardian

 

I’ve got lost in the thread.

 

Do you know where the route map, and the track diagrams for Wolfringham Harbour are?

 

Or, did I hallucinate drawing them?

 

The need for a concordance grows ever more pressing!

 

Kevin

 

 

Cograttyfellations, Kevin, I see you’re the one who made the milepost on the history of the WNR, etc., 10000th post!!! Yeah, high five, man, etc.

And I can't think of a more defining way of marking the 10000th post than the above highlighted line

dh

[Edwardian]

And, a faintly plausible reason for exporting Carr stone, which I don't think anyone ever bothered to do in reality, might be that it could be used as ballast in returning colliers, which explains the little-known clutch of Carr stone houses near the Tyne.

 

By stretching the geology, we can have coprolite beds intermingled with the stone, as they are slightly further south in the same belt of greensands, and the coprolites can leave by rail or sail.

 

The NMR really ought to be an utterly impoverished outfit, one that suffers periodic closures, before staggering to a complete halt, at which time everything is just left, engines in shed, wagons in sidings etc, for the next boom, which never comes. Think West Somerset Mineral Railway and Edge Hill Light Railway.

 

Maybe the NMR is having one of its "flash in the pan" revivals in 1905, perhaps in connection with attempt to smelt Carr stone to extract the iron from, as was tried in a few places ...... Edwardian doubtless knows.

 

Fitting that you, Kevin, should make this milestone post, which, I confess, for my part had gone unnoticed.

 

Perhaps, then, the NMR can have taken coal from the sea, coprolite to the sea and carstone from the coast. There was evidence of ironstone smetling in the distant past, so perhaps something of that, together with the local building trade.

 

Pretty thin excuse for a railway, let alone a standard gauge one, and it is in danger of being parallel to the West Norfolk and the Lynn-Hunstanton, so I agree that it must have led a half-forgotten and somewhat marginal existence. 

Edited May 26, 2018 by Edwardian

[Compound2632]

The NMR really ought to be an utterly impoverished outfit, one that suffers periodic closures, before staggering to a complete halt, at which time everything is just left, engines in shed, wagons in sidings etc, for the next boom, which never comes. 

 

Oh dear that sounds like too many modelling projects! Hopefully not this one.

 

A while back, perhaps as long ago as this morning, idle mention of Sir Walter Scott led, in true glorious CA fashion, to a digression on paddle steamers - possibly more pertinent to the Wolfringham branch than was Scott. I was at Railex at Stoke Mandeville today - excellent paddle steamer on Burntisland 1883. The layout had sprouted a roundhouse since last I saw it. One thing I like is that hardly any two locomotives on that layout bear the same livery, despite them all being North British - Stroudley's IEG and goods engine green (due, I think, to Dugald Drummond), various Wheatley greens and possibly just the earliest examples of Holmes' bronze green. The North British was still a very ramshackle impoverished affair in the early 1880s; although it's unreasonable to draw a comparison between this main line company and the WNR in the 1900s, I suspect that WNR engines carry a similar variety of liveries, perhaps depending on their origin and the state of the company finances at the time of acquisition?

[Londontram]

I wish I could remember the name of the rather snobby bloke who wrote about Norfolk and coined the name "Sea Appalling" for Sea Palling. Years back when I was a relatively frequent visitor to Norfolk (a place I have loved since my youth) I read a fair few of his books and found them wryly amusing in an odd sort of way.

It's not "The Kingdom by the Sea" by Paul Theroux is it.

His book is a rather cynical tour of the Brittish isles so sounds like how you discribed him. Personally I much preferred "Notes from a small island" by Bill Bryson though he didn't get to Norfolk in his book.

Edited May 26, 2018 by Londontram

[Nearholmer]

“Pretty thin excuse for a railway.......”

 

Yes, that very thought had occurred to me, along with the thought that, if it existed at all, it would have been c3ft gauge.

 

The biggest mental-block that I have with the NMR as currently conceived is that the volume of carrstone extracted by anybody, ever, all added together in a big heap, wouldn’t have necessitated a railway ....... smelting seems the only way of creating a demand for large enough volumes, so we probably need to sully the view from the Wolfringham eminence with a bank of furnaces, a bit like Hook Norton, which I think might sit on a richer part of the same geology [it doesn’t, which is probably why it succeeded, and ours didn’t!]

 

The history of obscure railways is littered with things that seem more unlikely than fiction, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too worried.

Edited May 26, 2018 by Nearholmer

[Nearholmer]

Another ‘good’ thing about iron smelting, or more likely calcining actually, is that it needs lots of coal, which has to be dragged uphill to the top of the furnace .....,.. which must be why that zig-zag was created.

[corneliuslundie]

Apologies for misreading the signals about the book mentioned several centuries ago. It obviously was a thrilling work of fiction rather than an erudite guide book (or swap the adjectives around to suit).

I think what led me down that blind alley is that I have just been reading "The legacy of England", published in 1935 by Batsford as part of its Pilgrim's Library. it has a multiplicity of authors on various country topics from farms to sports, but the chapter that appeals to me most is that on villages.

The author does very much what Edwardian has done and creates an imaginary village which contains all the features which he feels a proper village should contain. A difference from CA is that he intentionally does not position it in any geographical location, while the accompanying black and white photos are from all over the country. For anyone intending to write a fictional history of their proposed layout it would make a good primer. Of course 1935 is rather later than CA and many things have changed, not usually for the better, but the principle adopted seems to me admirable.

As an aside, in the chapter on pubs the author mentions new-fangled Road Houses which were evidently sprouting at the time around towns but seem to have died the death since - I cannot think of many roadside pubs with swimming pools and similar facilities. And he bemoans the threat to the "local" from such organisations as he British Legion, working men's clubs etc which at that time seem to have been taking trade from pubs.

However, I still feel that there is a clear need for a guide book to Castle Aching and its environs, and I suspect that it could be compiled from the writings in this thread, though as history is still being written - vide the possible presence of a mineral railway - it is probably premature to put pen to paper.

Jonathan

[Nearholmer]

Well, I’ve been putting several felt-tip pens to paper, in an attempt to provide a visual summary of the railways of the Wolfringham district.

 

There seem to be an awful lot of them, but each has a good reason for being there!

 

The NMR actually seems to pre-date both the GER and WNR, which I didn’t realise until I drew it, being as old as the 1820s in its original form. And, I’ve shown the narrow gauge tramway on Drossingham Bog, which served the peat mill and paraffin works which was established next to the NMR. I’ve not shown all of the many pits, scrapings, and diggings along the route of the NMR, only the larger ones.

 

We can see the WNR extension to Shepherd’s Port, and the gravel pits and concrete works that caused it to remain open long after the passenger service was withdrawn.

 

Informed readers might see influences from the Ffestiniog Railway, the West Somerset Mineral Railway, Hook Norton, Thorne Moors, several places in Ireland, Rye Harbour, and Gorleston, among others.

[Edwardian]

Apologies for misreading the signals about the book mentioned several centuries ago. It obviously was a thrilling work of fiction rather than an erudite guide book (or swap the adjectives around to suit).

I think what led me down that blind alley is that I have just been reading "The legacy of England", published in 1935 by Batsford as part of its Pilgrim's Library. it has a multiplicity of authors on various country topics from farms to sports, but the chapter that appeals to me most is that on villages.

The author does very much what Edwardian has done and creates an imaginary village which contains all the features which he feels a proper village should contain. A difference from CA is that he intentionally does not position it in any geographical location, while the accompanying black and white photos are from all over the country. For anyone intending to write a fictional history of their proposed layout it would make a good primer. Of course 1935 is rather later than CA and many things have changed, not usually for the better, but the principle adopted seems to me admirable.

As an aside, in the chapter on pubs the author mentions new-fangled Road Houses which were evidently sprouting at the time around towns but seem to have died the death since - I cannot think of many roadside pubs with swimming pools and similar facilities. And he bemoans the threat to the "local" from such organisations as he British Legion, working men's clubs etc which at that time seem to have been taking trade from pubs.

However, I still feel that there is a clear need for a guide book to Castle Aching and its environs, and I suspect that it could be compiled from the writings in this thread, though as history is still being written - vide the possible presence of a mineral railway - it is probably premature to put pen to paper.

Jonathan

 

Well, I wouldn't dismiss your conclusion, it was my first thought and I remain in two minds.

 

You are right, though, there does need to be a guide book, so, if not this, there would have to be some other.

 

The various local religious houses are covered in Thornton's Ecclesiastical History (an in-joke from undergraduate days), but a history of the district has yet to be identified.

 

 

Well, I’ve been putting several felt-tip pens to paper, in an attempt to provide a visual summary of the railways of the Wolfringham district.

 

There seem to be an awful lot of them, but each has a good reason for being there!

 

The NMR actually seems to pre-date both the GER and WNR, which I didn’t realise until I drew it, being as old as the 1820s in its original form. And, I’ve shown the narrow gauge tramway on Drossingham Bog, which served the peat mill and paraffin works which was established next to the NMR. I’ve not shown all of the many pits, scrapings, and diggings along the route of the NMR, only the larger ones.

 

We can see the WNR extension to Shepherd’s Port, and the gravel pits and concrete works that caused it to remain open long after the passenger service was withdrawn.

 

Informed readers might see influences from the Ffestiniog Railway, the West Somerset Mineral Railway, Hook Norton, Thorne Moors, several places in Ireland, Rye Harbour, and Gorleston, among others.

 

Marvellous!  Bravo!

 

Yes, it had been my assumption that the origins of the NMR were fairly ancient and pre-dated the other railways.  The WNR has the honour of being the first public railway in that part of the county, pre-dating both the Lynn & Hunstanton Railway (later GER) and the Lynn & Fakenham (later M&GN), but the mineral lines, horse-drawn for much of their early life, must pre-date even the WNR by several decades.

 

As has been apparent, I have been influenced both by walking part of the Caradon Railway in Cornwall last year, and delving into my local railway history with Tabitha, and my growing fascination for the Brampton Railway in Cumberland.

 

These influences came together with several existing strands of CA; the discussion of carstone, the transport of sea-borne coal from Wolfringham Staithe, the moribund coprolite workings and the associated waggonways, and the echo of the Cornwall Minerals Railway through the quite genuine migration of its locomotives to Norfolk.

 

The penultimate piece of the jigsaw was the long-boiler conversion of Northroader's Bourbonnais for Tabitha's school project.  I could not get out of my head a freelance version, similar to Tabitha's, but this time with outside cylinders and only a weatherboard instead of the S&D style cab.

 

Last but not least was the relish of sustaining something as improbable as a Norfolk Minerals Railway.

 

In my mind it became real and an inevitable part of the fictional world.  I am, therefore, very grateful to Kevin for bridging the credibility gap in such style despite times when his Improbability Alarm must have been ringing at full volume.  

 

And so to bed.

[TheQ]

It's not "The Kingdom by the Sea" by Paul Theroux is it.

His book is a rather cynical tour of the Brittish isles so sounds like how you discribed him. Personally I much preferred "Notes from a small island" by Bill Bryson though he didn't get to Norfolk in his book.

Bill Bryson was of course a Norfolk Boy... well He lived in Wramplingham (40miles from castle Aching) for ten years-ish. I did see him in Cromer back then..

Now he lives in Hampshire.

[Edwardian]

My education attempts to keep pace with developments.

 

Kevin mentioned calcining the iron ore.  This, you will recall, is a reason why significant quantities of the coal landed at Wolfringham Staithe would be transported inland to the kilns.  Thus I read:

 

The calcining of iron ore is the process of concentrating the ore by roasting it with small coal.    This process has the effect of driving off moisture, carbon dioxide, etc., and of oxidising the ore from ferrous to ferric oxide, ready for smelting in a blast furnace.    .... it was particularly important to carry out this process, as it had the additional benefit of reducing the weight of the ore by removing unwanted constituents, so saving on the considerable freight charges.    Calcining was often done by laying down clamps of iron ore, mixed with slack coal, over a foot-thick (0.3 m.) layer of coal, and then igniting them. (http://apack1.co.uk/htmlpage1.html).

 

There are numerous examples in the UK. Cylindrical brick calcining kilns are found at Wakerley, Rutland. The Wakerley iron ore quarries were active only from 1916-21 as the ore was found to be of poor quality: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4899654

 

Raasay, Inner Hebrides, has some interesting ironstone calcining kilns

 

Cleveland was known for iron ore extraction, and there is a museum that I have often wished to visit.  There is an interesting entry in grace's guide on John Borrie, who designed kilns for Cleveland ironworks in 1869: https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/John_Borrie.  Vast steel towers seem to have become the norm for Cleveland in later years, and were also seen at Irthlingborough in Northamptonshire.  These , I feel, would be entirely inappropriate for our small, marginal, operation in Norfolk.

 

Rosedale, North York Moors, is an impressive site, Rosedale West featuring stone kilns from 1864: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/20641. Rosedale East, which is the subject of a finescale layout on RMWeb, was a haunt of displaced Stockton & Darlington long-boiler mineral engines, which were fitted with tender cabs for working this line. 

 

EDIT: Text had appeared twice!

Edited May 27, 2018 by Edwardian