Posted by Laurence Monkhouse on December 06, 2005 at 19:30:58 from 80.3.128.6 user Laurence_.
In Reply to: Re: ... through Yarmouth posted by Jock on December 06, 2005 at 16:33:36:
It wasn't only silting which closed the Yare to seagoing shipping. In 1998 we took the Lydia Eva YH 89, the last surviving steam herring drifter up to Norwich, rather as a gesture as it was clear that she would be the very last seagoing ship to reach the port of Norwich.
She is quite a small ship, but not only did she ground on almost every bend and needed two tugs to pull her through, nut we had to saw two feet off her mizzen mast to get under the new bridge on the bypass.
I fancy that any ship in commercial service today will have a taller mast than the Lydia's mizzen, so effectively it is the road, at least as much as the silting, which has killed Norwich as a port after thousands of years.