BROADLAND IN WINTER 



THE Norfolk Broads are well known to most of us 

 as they appear in summer, when a more or less 

 cloudless sky paints their waters blue, when there is 

 scarce wind to make a whisper in the long wall of 

 sedges, when the halcyon, a living azurite, dashes 

 after its prey, or hovers, as some say, to fascinate 

 little fish with its flame-coloured breast Not much 

 before June do holiday-makers seek the Broads, to 

 speed over their watery vastness in foreign yacht or 

 red-sailed wherry, better adapted to local uses. They 

 find the meadows knee-deep in grass and vivid flowers, 

 trees full-foliaged, reeds blue-green from the high 

 tide of their sap, water-lilies covering the water with 

 tumbled leaves and opening rich cups of blossom. 

 By the time the August tide of visitors is at its 

 height, land-locked waters like Fritton are not only 

 choked with larger herbage, but crowded almost to 

 the consistency of pea-soup by countless tiny animal, 

 vegetable, and border-line atoms swimming free in 

 it. The angler grumbles because the rivers are one 

 jam of natural food ; the yachtsman runs some risk of 

 getting becalmed in the middle of Wroxham or Oulton. 

 When the swallows have departed and the hooded 

 crows have come back, Broad land begins to put on 

 a totally new aspect. The luxuriance of summer 

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