Brancaster is a lovely spot (the blue spot) on the Norfolk Riviera with salt marshes, plenty of birds dibbling and dabbling thereon, marvellous skyscapes (although we didn’t yet see the Northern Lights) and more.
So it’s funny Wikipedia undersells it, making some underwhelming boasts. For example, The Royal West Norfolk Golf Club is the 47th best course in the UK and Ireland, Wiki avers. That needs updating, now it is the 60th best course, pipped by County Louth at Baltray. Here’s how Golf Monthly describes it.
”Packed with character and more than a little bit different, this rugged links is a wonderful golfing experience from start to finish. Some holes and the entrance road have been affected by the tide, but this merely adds to the character of this step-back-in-time links that is still a true test in the modern era. Also known as ‘Brancaster’, this mainly two-ball only club is a wonderful experience of links golf from start to finish with some stirring holes.”
Read between the lines … I don’t play golf, although I have a grounding in ‘links rules’ from a friend who explained them to me in longueurs in trading oil futures. I have found two balls sufficient. It is a good space-filler to describe what has not happened at Brancaster and this tickles my fancy.
“In the 1950s and 60s, Brancaster was considered as a possible location for the launching site for the British space programme. This idea was expanded to include the village becoming the base for a facility that could be used by a spaceplane to undertake secret flights over the USSR. Development would have meant that the village would probably have been razed and the villagers rehoused. The eventual installation of oil rigs in the North Sea saw the idea shelved, as the risk, however slight, of atmospheric re-entry material hitting the rigs, was too great.”
The Roman fort (Branodunum), like so much of ancient England, has been more or less obliterated by a 1970s housing estate but Brancaster does have a wreck of which to boast. A seaside holiday would be incomplete without a wreck – at least in an Enid Blyton adventure.
Frankly, if Wiki claimed this is the wreck of a Viking longship I’d be a believer but it is the remains of SS Vina; more Masefield than Nordic.
“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal, Road-rail, pig-lead, Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.” (Extract from Cargoes, John Masefield)
SS Vina “was a coast-hugging general cargo ship which would have worked the crossings between the east coast of England and through to the Baltic states. As she neared the end of her useful seagoing life in 1940, Vina was requisitioned as a naval vessel for wartime use as a blockship, carrying a crew of 12. With Great Yarmouth being a strategic port on the east coast, the ultimate fate for the ship would have been to have had her hold filled with concrete and explosives and she would have been sunk at the harbour mouth, blocking entry in the event of a Nazi invasion. Once this threat passed, she was taken out of blockship service and towed up the east coast towards Brancaster where she was used as a target for the RAF before the planned invasion of Normandy in 1944.” (Wikipedia)
You might imagine the RAF sank the Vina but that is not the case. “Originally anchored further out to sea on the Titchwell side as a target for cannon shell trials, she dragged her anchor on 20 August 1944, in a north-westerly gale and ran ashore.” (Wikipedia)
I think the photo of the wreck is of the Sheraton on Hunstanton beach, not the Vina. The red and white cliffs in the photo are at Hunstanton. The Vina is, as you correctly state, at Brancaster where there are no cliffs only salt marsh.
So glad you are enjoying your holiday.
Louise, thank you. Not for the first time I have been let down by Google images! As you know the area, we went to The Jolly Sailors in Brancaster Staithe and had lovely, bracing walks at Holkham, Holme Nature Reserve and Brancaster Staithe.