Month on the Norfolk Broads

In the summer of the late 1880s, Walter Rye and a party of companions set sail on the Norfolk Broads aboard two distinctive vessels: the wherry Zöe and the hybrid wherry-cutter Lotus. Their mission: a month's leisurely exploration of this singular English wetland, its ancient churches, weathered windmills, and forgotten villages. Joining Rye were an American couple tracing their Norfolk ancestry, plus a cast the author himself describes with disarming honesty: "the poet, the athlete, the liar and the antiquary." What unfolds is not merely a travelogue but a tender portrait of a England still largely untouched by modernity, rendered by a man who knew every creek and ruin. Rye was born in London but his family hailed from Norfolk, and he returned to become the county's acknowledged expert on its history. The book pulses with his antiquarian passion: medieval churches, ghostly legends, the layering of centuries in a single waterside hamlet. For readers who crave slowness, who want to drift through a world where a day's journey might begin at dawn and end with a pint at a riverside inn, this is an invitation to climb aboard and let the wind fill the sails.