THE WILD SIDE OF THE BROADS
“THE BROADS REMAIN ‘A BREATHING PLACE FOR THE CURE OF SOULS’”
There is a quiet magic to the Broads. A feeling that you’re not so much moving through a landscape, but through time. In a place of wide water and wider skies, with its whispering reeds, abundant wildlife, sail-powered boats and old windpumps, it is as if modern life hasn’t quite caught up.
The Broads is the newest of the UK’s 10 national parks and the only one that’s almost exclusively wetland. For 117 square miles its water sogs across Norfolk and drips into Suffolk. The rivers Bure, Ant, Thurne, Yare, Chet, Waveney and Wensum wind across the region, connecting with more than 60 shallow lakes or broads, from the biggest at Barton and Hickling to the small, yet beautiful, wood-lined waters of Salhouse Broad.
Once thought to be natural, the Broads are in fact the flooded remnants of ancient peat diggings. This doesn’t make them any less wild: these wetlands have been moulded and filled with nature. More than
