People talk about Norfolk’s big skies, but until we relocated here two years ago I didn’t fully appreciate what they meant. Even now I’m sometimes ambushed by the strangeness of the landscape: the relentless flatness, the sense of being constantly exposed. (I don’t know how it compares to the American Midwest – please do message and tell me – but to me there’s something peculiarly inspiring about countryside where we’re forced to invent interest; it does something strange to the mind.)
Elsewhere, the topography of East Anglia – Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire – is varied and beautiful and often deeply eerie. Still and reed-covered Broads. Bleak fens. Crumbling coastline, thriving medieval ports swallowed by the sea. Facing Europe, it is an ancient place of arriving. There have been people here a long, long time – 800,000 years, at least. From the treasures of Sutton Hoo to the recent worldview-collapsing discovery that humans were making fire 350,000 years earlier than we previously knew, there’s no telling what’s buried in the peat and the clay. How could that not inspire you?
Continue reading “Five Books Set in the East of England, recommended by Laura Evans”
