Sweet Briar marshes are both close to my home and close to my heart, situated less than five hundred meters away from my back garden and a place I loved exploring as a child. They’re a place where you can escape to and forget that you live within an ever-expanding city, seemingly intent on gobbling up all the lovely green bits that surround it. It’s also often fondly remembered by some of the veteran Mile Cross residents who would sneak across the railway lines, avoiding the railway police and the farmers to indulge in some dyke-jumping or to collect tadpoles. At thirty-six hectares the marshes are relic of the wet meadows that straddled the rare chalk stream named the river Wensum (which is the Anglo Saxon word for winding) all the way from its source out at Whissonsett in a remote part of the UK’s driest and flattest county, to it’s confluence with the river Yare just east of the city. There are only 210 of these rare chalk streams in the world, of which 160 (73%) are to be found here in the UK, many of which can be found right here in Norfolk. The largest being our very own river Wensum, which also happens to be one of the finest examples in the country. The Wensum glides by the southern edges of our estate from Hellesdon, entering under the fairly recently added Sweetbriar Bridge of 1933, before opening out nicely as the Sweetbriar and Mile Cross marshes right on our doorstep. From there it meanders at a leisurely pace right into the centre of our city, creating a little slither of green, an unusual little oasis of nature right up until the point it drops into the city (literally) over the sluices at New Mills Yard. From here on in the river is once again tidal as it merges into and rather confusingly gets consumed by it’s smaller sibling, the River Yare, which then transports the ghost of the Wensum all the way out to sea at the Yare’s mouth or Great Yarmouth. Wouldn’t ‘Great Wensumouth’ sound much better? From here it makes its way back into the atmosphere only to be dumped on the land once again upstream to start the whole cycle all over again.
The Mile Cross Man 