Posted by Robert Dilley on February 09, 2004 at 15:49:53 from 216.211.4.85 user rdilley.
In Reply to: Re: historical references posted by John Nichols on February 09, 2004 at 15:02:14:
Many of the Broads are privately owned, and the proprietors keep out the riff-raff by putting chains strung from posts across their access channels.
I presume the reference in AR is to an earlier time when fewer Broads were so cut off. When we did our expedition there in 1988 it seemed aabout half the Broads were closed.
Incidentally, it wasn't known when AR was writing (though some hypothesised it) but most of the Norfolk Broads are artificial -- the result of centuries of peat-digging followed by flooding. This was finally established in a heavyweight research book whose title caused a good deal of mirth in the US: "The Making of the Broads". My research supervisor from Cambridge was one of the authors, and he never saw what was funny about the title.