The Broads

The Broads hold the best geological plot twist in Britain: the shallow lakes strung along the rivers Bure, Ant, Thurne, Yare and Waveney were assumed natural until 1960, when the botanist Joyce Lambert's peat borings showed their sides were vertical and their floors flat — they are pits. Medieval Norfolk, nearly treeless and rich, dug some nine hundred million cubic feet of peat for fuel from the twelfth century on (Norwich Cathedral's accounts record the turf barges), and when sea levels rose in the storm-lashed fourteenth century the diggings drowned. Sixty-odd broads, joined by about two hundred kilometres of lock-free navigable river, are thus Europe's grandest accidental landscape — Britain's largest protected wetland, given national-park-equivalent status by its own Act of Parliament in 1988, with a statutory third purpose no other park carries: navigation.

That makes it the park you do by boat, heir to a working waterway. Trading wherries — black-sailed, single-masted barges built for these rivers — ran freight here into the twentieth century, and the survivor Albion still sails; their descendants are the varnished wooden cabin yachts still hired gaff-rig from Hunter's Yard at Ludham, and the hire-cruiser fleets of Wroxham and Potter Heigham, whose medieval bridge is low enough that a pilot takes the wheel. The skyline is drainage: dozens of wind pumps stand along the marsh dykes, from Horsey's restored tower to Berney Arms mill — seven storeys, the tallest in the country — beside Breydon Water's estuary. St Benet's Abbey on the Bure, a ruined gatehouse with an eighteenth-century mill grown through it, was the one English monastery never formally dissolved; the Bishop of Norwich, still its titular abbot, arrives by wherry each summer to preach in the open air.

The wildlife is the other superlative. The Broads carry a quarter of Britain's rarest species: the swallowtail butterfly survives nowhere else in Britain — its caterpillars feed only on the fens' milk parsley — the bittern boomed on here through its national near-extinction, marsh harriers are now the default large bird, and the common crane, absent from Britain for about four hundred years, quietly began breeding again at Horsey in 1979. Ranworth's church tower — the "Cathedral of the Broads", with the finest medieval painted screen in Norfolk below — gives the one aerial view of how it all fits: reed, water, grazing marsh and sails apparently moving through fields.

What's worth knowing before you go

Norwich is the hub, and the Wherry Lines do something no other park's railway does — Hoveton & Wroxham, Acle, Reedham and Great Yarmouth stations sit on the water, and Berney Arms halt has no road to it at all. A day launch or canoe from Wroxham, Ludham or Martham teaches the place faster than anything; sailors should book Hunter's Yard early. The crowds are asymmetric: the northern rivers carry nearly all the hire traffic, while the southern Yare and Waveney — and anywhere under sail at Hickling or Barton — stay near-empty even in August. Come May–June for swallowtails at How Hill or Hickling, winter for raptor roosts and the Horsey grey-seal pupping beach, and remember the whole place is tidal: currents reverse, Breydon Water is genuinely serious, and mooring fees are the local tax on paradise.