The Broads
— — a county that mostly travels by water.
Not only on a wall.
“A hundred and twenty-five miles of slow water threaded across Norfolk and Suffolk, between reed beds and alder carr. The broads themselves are flooded medieval peat pits: people dug fuel, the sea rose, the holes filled. Hire boats from Wroxham or Beccles and the speed limit on most stretches is four knots. Bittern, marsh harrier, swallowtail butterfly. Reed cutters still work the margins in winter.
The Broads, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Broads is a network of seven rivers and around 63 broads spread across Norfolk and Suffolk in eastern England, with roughly 125 miles (200 kilometres) of navigable water. The Broads Authority, set up in 1989, manages the area with a status equivalent to a National Park, covering 303 square kilometres centred between Norwich and the North Sea coast at Great Yarmouth. The principal rivers are the Bure, Yare, and Waveney with their tributaries the Ant, Thurne, and Chet. The land sits barely above sea level, and most of the broads are no more than three or four metres deep.
The broads look natural but are not. Cambridge researchers led by Joyce Lambert showed in the 1960s that the pits were dug for peat between roughly the 9th and 14th centuries, when East Anglia had little woodland and peat was the main fuel. Rising sea levels through the late medieval period flooded the workings, and by the 1400s commercial peat cutting had stopped. The traditional working boat is the Norfolk wherry, a single-sail black-hulled barge that carried cargo until the 1940s; the trust-owned Albion still sails the rivers most summers.
The Broads is the last UK refuge of the swallowtail butterfly, which depends on milk-parsley growing in the fens. Hickling Broad, the largest at about 140 hectares, is also one of the few British strongholds of the bittern, a heron whose booming call carries across the reedbeds in spring. The RSPB and Norfolk Wildlife Trust manage core reserves including Hickling and Strumpshaw Fen. Reed cutting still takes place by hand each winter; the cut reed thatches roofs across East Anglia and well beyond.