In a previous Norfolk Wildlife Trust blog [Thorpe Marshes in the 1960s, January 2017] I wrote about Thorpe Marshes in the 1960s.
That was after meeting John Rushmer who, during that decade, had a herd of
cattle for milking on what is now the NWT nature reserve - Honeyguide's local patch. At
that time I had no pictures from the 1960s to illustrate the story.
John
Rushmer has now located two slides taken at the time. The Kodachrome slides are
undated, but they are of a design used by Kodak from 1959-1962. John was
offered the grazing in 1960 and started grazing livestock there from 1961; these
slides show the marshes after ploughing and sowing with rye grass so they will
be from 1961 at the earliest and more likely from 1962. The slides were scanned
and cleaned up by Thorpe Marshes volunteer Derek Longe.
The first
is a view of Thorpe Marshes from the pedestrian footbridge over the adjacent
railway line, looking south. The most striking feature of the landscape is its
openness. There’s not a tree or bit of scrub to be seen on the north side of
the River Yare, though the wooded landscape on the south side of the river at
Whitlingham is much as now. The gravel pit, now called St Andrews Broad, is
also not yet there: that was dug in the 1990s and the posts and wires went at
around the same time.
Towards
the right of the picture is the bail, the mobile milking unit. It surprised me
to see it here, close to the river, as the concrete pad put in as a base for the
bail is farther east on the marsh – somewhat beyond the left edge of the photo.
“The reason to see the milking bail on the marsh,” says John, “is because
before we did the concrete standing we towed the bail from marsh to marsh where
the cows would be grazing.”
The second
photo shows a group of Friesians waiting
to be milked. The man is the photo by the milk churns is John Rushmer’s head herdsman
Frank Bracey. “And what a good man he was too, very knowledgeable with
livestock,” says John.
Chris Durdin, April 2018.
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