Your Love Letters to Norfolk: a new centenary campaign

Our collection was started by CPRE Norfolk’s President, Sir Nicholas Bacon, who contributed a special letter which was featured in the Eastern Daily Press on Valentine’s Day.

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Read Sir Nicholas’s letter

Your love letters – what Norfolk means to you

We were thrilled with the response to our campaign. Many of you got in touch to tell us why Norfolk is so special to you and why it should be protected.

Here are some of our favourites.

A poem about Norfolk – by Ryta Lyndley

Why I love Norfolk – by The Lord Mayor of Norwich, Cllr Paul Kendrick

I Love Norfolk because it is where my three children, James, Joanne and Daniel, grew up.

Norwich and Norfolk are such wonderful places to raise children. Norwich is a safe place and allows young people to travel by bus to access such great activities.

I loved taking my children to Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach so we could all enjoy the joyrides and the rollercoaster – perhaps I did even more than them.

I love Norfolk heritage railways, which I took all my children to and still do, including The North Norfolk Railway between Sheringham and Holt, The Mid Norfolk Railway between Wymondham and Dereham, the railway between Wells and Walsingham and the Bure Valley Railway between Aylsham and Wroxham.

I love Norfolk because there are so many great places to walk. There are so many small towns to visit and to love.

I just love Norfolk.

Cllr Paul Kendrick, The Lord Mayor of Norwich

A love letter to Norfolk – by Lisa Ashbury

I have lived in Norfolk for ten years now.

Long before I moved here, I felt drawn to it. My much-loved grandfather spent many years holidaying on the Broads with my grandmother. His face used to light up when he spoke about the countryside and being out on the water. He talked about big skies, birds singing (and quacking) and early mornings on the river. Listening to him, I felt as though I already knew this place, and I knew I wanted to see it for myself.

When I finally visited from my home in Bedfordshire, I completely fell in love.

It’s the skies! In summer and winter alike, the sunrises and sunsets take my breath away. Those red sunrises that only last for a few minutes – I feel so lucky to be out there, witnessing them as they develop in front of me. The way you can see for miles here feels freeing, coming from Scotland the landscape there always felt a little claustrophobic to me. There is space to think, to notice, to feel small in the best possible way. There is so much to take in.

The people I know here are fiercely proud of this county, and for very good reason. Norfolk is a beautiful place to live, to walk, to kayak, to cycle, or simply to be.

It is also full of life. I never tire of spotting stoats or weasels (I’m still never entirely sure which is which!) darting through hedgerows. I’ve watched herds of roe deer chasing one another across open fields when no one else is looking. And the owls – barn, short-eared, long-eared – gliding low over misty fields at first light, hunting breakfast in the quiet dawn. Those moments feel like gifts.

I often catch myself thinking how lucky I am to live here, I really do.

That is why I am proud to live here (the best county in the UK) and to be part of a charity that works to protect and regenerate our countryside. Norfolk is a gem – precious, resilient and deeply loved. It deserves care, thoughtfulness and long-term vision.

And perhaps most of all, I feel close to my grandfather here. When I stand by the water, or watch the light change over the fields, I think of him. His love of this place helped bring me here. In some small way, I feel I am continuing something he began.

Norfolk, you are not just where I live.
You are where I feel at home.

With love and thanks
Lisa Ashbury

My Norfolk – by Chris Dady

Norfolk Loam – by Nick Allen

You are the gritty richness of my home
The dark horizon in furrows thrown
I’m bound to you by yeoman roots
Of generations with clay clumped boot
Who turned the seedbed with horse and rein,
Then ploughed by steam’s advancing chain,
And now through diesel’s endless traction
Still chase the harvest’s growing fraction.

Beneath my step you hold your ground:
A mix of silt and sand and clay, well-bound.
A friable tilth, a living skin,
Where humus threads the roots within;
Fungal lace and earthworm cast
Turn stubble, dung, from seasons past
To carbon fixed and safely stored
In aggregates the plough still scored

At Holkham’s park the vision grew
As Coke proved what good loam can do:
That root and stock, and care
Could knit the soil and farmer fair.
How four-course rotation remade the field
Wheat and barley’s reliable yield,

Then subsoilers deepens every seam,
And chemicals flow in silver stream,
Brought quickened growth and taller grain,
Yet leached the subtle life and strain;
What centuries of dung and ley
Had banked in carbon day by day,
Rose gently on a warming breeze.

So may this century learn at last
From tended fields and lessons past:
That soil is more than yield per acre
It is climate’s quiet risk-abater.
In roots left long through minimum till
Your humus stores again can fill
Through carbon sequestration
Once more you come to save our nation

A heartfelt letter to Norfolk – by Steve Mackinder

Dear Norfolk

Sorry it’s been so long since I last wrote to you. This is a hard letter to write but we’ve known each other for some 68 years but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that our initial attraction has waned as you’ve found others who caught your eye.

The days of walks under hawthorns littered with the ethereal ‘hay’ nests of tree sparrows are gone and instead of sparrows it’s the low roar of traffic on the bypass which is the soundtrack of our lives. I wistfully recall picnic Sundays on the beach at Holme when a blistering sun shone to a horizon untrammelled by twirling metal windmills only there now to light the drive home on ‘dualled’ tarmac bypasses.

I don’t know when my love for you changed but I recall a tipsy midnight garden walk alone and heard a cuckoo calling in the dark…. my blood ran cold and something in me broke… it was as though the midnight cuckoo heralded the end of things as I wanted them to be.

Gentlemanly convention requires me to offer you some trite squit about the problem not being you but me…. but sadly it’s not true. It is you who has changed and while
I still want you I don’t think I love you anymore and everything around me says you’ve moved on.. and I don’t want to.

No doubt I’ll still see you every now and again across a field or a hedge and remember past times… but as always happens now, a car or a low flying jet will spoil the moment.

Sorry for the melancholy…. it underlies every hour and unless someone in the Citadel at Trowse wakes up one day and sees the damage they’ve done to our relationship I think we’ll continue to grow apart….. and it makes me sad.

Steve Mackinder

Our Norfolk countrysides – by Prof. Tim O’Riordan

Our landscapes are best understood by our countrysides.

Our wonderful countrysides are shaped and fashioned by diversifying agriculture, strengthening nature, and controlling development.

All our countrysides are outcomes of countless generations of caring effort and uncaring neglect.

All our countrysides have become what they are over the past century largely due to the attention of the Council for the Protection of Rural England and its sister relatives in the UK nationhoods.

In its hundredth year CPRE has morphed into a campaigning countryside charity. Without its alertness, our countrysides would be characterised by uncaring neglect. Now is the time for all generations to appreciate its legacy.

I have the honour of being President of CPRE Norfolk for close to a quarter of its century. What I have experienced is the dedications of volunteers who have devoted their knowledge, experience, and love of heritage in the cause of countryside care. Without their commitment, we would all be unknowingly worse off.

Over these turbulent ten decades it has been hard pounding. Now we face a forthcoming ten decades of unimaginable convulsion. Many of this year’s newborns will live through this. Theirs is a future which has already arrived.

If the new Norfolk Countryside Care movement hits its stride, it will shape the land with a mix of regeneration of new natures, of restored soils, of bold scenery, of sociable communities, and of security of living, and the enrichment of souls.

CPRE Norfolk has every reason to be forever proud. Its noble legacy will be hugely magnified if everyone in this marvellous county becomes a countryside champion.

Imagined voices from Norfolk’s past

To help inspire people to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard), we have created a series of imagined love letters from figures closely associated with Norfolk’s history.

These include:

• Lord Nelson, reflecting on the county that shaped his sense of duty and resolve. (Read Lord Nelson’s letter here)
• Boudica, writing fiercely of land, freedom and identity (Read Boudica’s letter here)
• Julian of Norwich, offering a contemplative vision of care, continuity and hope (Read Julian of Norwich’ letter here)
• Edith Cavell, speaking quietly of service, compassion and responsibility (Read Edith Cavell’s letter here)
• Anna Sewell, talking about Norfolk as a kind companion with truth and beauty (Read Anna Sewell’s letter here)

These letters are not intended as historical reconstructions, but as creative reflections – a way of showing that love for Norfolk has always taken many forms, and that the impulse to protect it is shared across time.