Morston

Boats at Morston Quay

Morston Creek

The poet Edwin Brock wrote a moving poem about the area called Morston Marshes. Brock moved to Norfolk in the 1970s and lived for most of the time at Low Tharston - next door to fellow poet Anthony Thwaite. In 1993 Brock suffered a stroke which, for many weeks, left him unable to speak and seriously impaired his memory. However, he made a remarkable recovery and then entered a new phase in his writing - much of it inspired by the Norfolk landscape. In his Morston poem he envisages a reincarnation in the bleak but beautiful salt marshes:
 

in the growing puddles
gulls drill the marsh
for nothing we can see
or screech their territory
like fishwives
from the tops of poles

even in August
the sky drowns us
in small drops
settling on hair and eyes
wanting us flying in it
or grovelling in the ooze
at the water's edge

I died in this country
and came back
to pay my debts
to its wetlands

something fishes me
all the way
back to where it began

and is beginning again
down the years
with a million denials.

The novelist William Rivière set his debut novel Watercolour Sky (1990) in Morston amongst the sailing community.
 

Links:

Morston Hall