...a poet, prize-winning children's author, master storyteller and the voice of north Norfolk's atmospheric coastline. His touching and evocative memoir of childhood , The Hidden Roads, is published in paperback this month.
Kevin Crossley-Holland is a poet, prize-winning children’s author, master storyteller and the voice of north Norfolk’s atmospheric coastline. His touching and evocative memoir of childhood, The Hidden Roads, is published in paperback this month.
Burnham Overy Staithe
The more you look, the more you see: That’s true of anyone, anything, anywhere, but nowhere more than this view of Burnham Overy Staithe taken from the dyke that leads from the staithe to the sea.
In my poetry and fiction, I’ve called this village Waterslain (the old Norfolk word for “flooded”) and I find it spellbinding for several reasons. It’s female and male – just look at the graceful curve of the shining creek below the black-eyed Maltings, the crusted upright stanchions. It’s complex – a fascinating jigsaw of wild salt marsh and pulk (marsh-pool), dune and groyne, gravel-spit and creek. Again, its condition is flux – what you see is always the same, always quite different. One moment the light is keen and cutting, and the next, water, earth and air seem to be one indivisible lung.
All this, and then I remember how Nelson and Woodget walked here, and see in the cluster-and-huddle of buildings stories of hardship on a threatened coast.
This place, I see it but taste and smell and hear it too: Salt on the tongue; pungent, iodine-rich marsh mud, the thick scent of sea-lavender; singing masts, and the honking of wild geese.
