A love letter to Norfolk

Dinky market towns and seal-strewn beaches? Local opinions, Sunday drives, Blackpool-of-the-East and early churches, this is novelist D. J. Taylor's Norfolk and he wouldn't want to live anywhere else

- D. J. Taylor

Land of mists and magic: a purple sunrise at Thurne Windmill on the Norfolk Broads

PEOPLE who live outside Norfolk and get their ideas about it from television programmes nearly always assume that the backdrop is more or less identikit, a matter of flat fields, wide skies, picturesque churches nestling among the reed beds and, once you get to the eastern side, seal-strewn beaches. In fact, the county is as differentiated as anywhere else. This is a big place—70 miles from Elm in the remote north-western corner down to Gorleston on the eastern coast in sight of the Suffolk border-with variations to match. The gap between one of the dinky north Norfolk market towns, with their stratospherically priced second-homer cottages, and some of the downbeat Breckland hamlets is as wide as the gulf between Hampstead and Brixton.

Thatched boathouses on Hickling Broad.

Characteristic tall Dutch gables and warm red brick at Blickling Hall