Tunstall and the River Bure connection

The River Bure. Photograph by M Hobbs

When we visited nearly 30 years ago, Tunstall seemed to be a remote place with the graves of my great great grandfather and 2nd great uncles and 2nd great aunt in the overgrown churchyard with the semi-ruined church. My mother and I were about to give up the search when I turned the car and the resident with the rosy cheeks came out of her house to empty the tea leaves out of her tea pot, so I was able to show her the picture of the house we were seeking and ask her. When I drove down the lane, it seemed, at the time, increasingly unlikely there would be anything like the substantial house in the picture in such a remote place.

   We found it eventually and, as I put in an earlier post, had a friendly welcome from the farmer and the family who lived there.

   The letters show an interaction with the close cousins at Thrigby which is some ten miles away. Jane Betsy's surviving son Harry, according to his letters and those she kept from my great grandmother's cousins, is a musician, popular with the ladies and gets about a bit. As puzzles very often do, when we go to sleep on them, part of the answers are clear in the morning.

   I discovered the River Bure had been navigable since the 17th century and possibly earlier. The 30 miles up to Ludham were extended in the 18th century to Aylsham and beyond with a series of canals and locks. There is even the quaintly named "Muck Fleet" connecting the river with Filby Broad. The river connects with the Thurne, the Ant and the Yare at Yarmouth. Local landowners and farmers invested between £50 and £150 in the waterway extension scheme. It is possible some of these were aunts, uncles and cousins of, and the family at Tunstall.

   Jane Betsy and her family, the Skinners of Tunstall were connected, by the river, with her sisters' families, the close Skinner cousins at Thrigby, the Pages of Stokesby and Oby, the Allards of Filby (before they moved to Moulton St Mary) the Neaves of Ludham and all the aunts, grandparents and cousins who lived in, and retired to, Yarmouth.

   The River Bure navigation transported, flour, agricultural produce, coal, timber and bricks. Also marl, which was fertiliser, was transported down from Coltishall through a dyke system from the Horstead Hall estate area, which I think the Norfolk sense of humour calls 'Little Switzerland'.

   A fleet of 26 wherries capable of carrying 13 tons worked the river navigation. At the time of writing, the broads cruises are probably not running. If you take a cruise, though, just out from Wroxham is a wherry called the "Hathor." This was a passenger wherry. These craft would be the easiest way for the families to keep in touch with each other. With a fleet of 26 working wherries on the River Bure between Aylsham and Yarmouth every day, the staithe at Tunstall connected with Yarmouth, in the east and as far as Melton Constable in the north west. The marl trade finished in 1870.  

    A railway connection from Norwich to Yarmouth had existed since the 1840s. In the 1880s a large railway depot was constructed at Melton Constable to connect the region with the midlands.

    Whether it was family circumstances, illness or tolls and taxes, something prompted Jane Betsy to leave her birthplace, her childhood and family home at Tunstall in 1875 and move to 1 Albion Terrace, Heigham Road, Norwich, with her five surviving daughters. The picture below is the passenger wherry "Hathor".