Brancaster

Brancaster is a village and civil parish on the north coast of the English county of Norfolk. The civil parish of Brancaster comprises Brancaster itself, together with Brancaster Staithe and Burnham Deepdale. The three villages form a more or less continuous settlement along the A149 at the edge of marshland fringing Brancaster Bay and the Scolt Head Island National Nature Reserve. The villages are located about 5 km west of Burnham Market, 35 km north of the town of King's Lynn and 50 km north-west of the city of Norwich.ref|osexp1

The civil parish has an area of 21.43 km² and in the 2001 census had a population of 897 in 453 households. For the purposes of local government, the parish falls within the district of King's Lynn and West Norfolk.ref|osnncc The Clerk to Brancaster Parish Council has recently reached 40 years of service in this post.

A petrified forest can be seen on the shore near Brancaster at low tide. There was a Roman settlement here named Branodunum. The Saxon Shore fort at Brancaster, and accompanying area (much of which was destroyed during the construction of a locally opposed housing development in the 1970s) is not visible now, and remains mainly untouched. The garrison at Brancaster was made up of cavalry from Dalmatia. Native Roman centurions and officers were rarely posted to such remote places unless deemed necessary for disciplinary reasons.

Numerous theories exist as to what the Roman presence would have made or exploited in the area, in particular, the natural harbour that the fort would have been very close to at that time. Theories have connected it with amber although a more likely cargo would have been grain and oysters.

The Church of Burnham Deepdale St Mary is one of 124 existing round-tower churches in Norfolk.

The wreck that can be seen off the harbour is the coaster SS Vina which was used for target practice by the RAF before sinking in 1944. The SS Vina was built at Leith by Ramage & Ferguson in 1894, and was registered at Grangemouth. She was a coast-hugging general cargo ship which would have worked the crossongs between the east coast of England and through to the Baltic states.

As she neared the end of her useful seagoing life in 1940, Vina was requisitioned as a naval vessel for wartime use, carrying a crew of 12. With Great Yarmouth being a strategic port on the east coast, the ultimate "fate" for the ship would have been to have had her hold filled with explosives, and destroyed at the mouth of the harbour, thus blocking entry in the event of Nazi invasion. However, as this threat passed, she was taken out of service and towed up the east coast towards Brancaster where she was to be used as a target for the RAF before the planned Normandy invasions.

The ship was subsequently sunk and the wreck remains on the sandbank to this day. Numerous efforts have been made to retrieve the wreckage as the ship was not only a danger to navigation, but also an attraction to the holiday makers on Brancaster beach who regularly walked out to the vessels remains at low tide. Lives have been lost due to these ill advised actions and the local lifeboats and RAF rescue helicopters have been pressed into service on many occasions each Summer.

Removal efforts have long been abandoned due to the excessive costs involved. One ambitions suggestion involved blowing the remains up, but it was calcualted that so much explosive would be needed, the subsequent explosion would have broken every window in Brancaster and Brancaster Staithe. A touch apocryphal maybe, but, even so, the wreck is destined to spend may more decades on the sands before time and tide eventually erode it away completely.

References

* Ordnance Survey (2002). "OS Explorer Map 250 - Norfolk Coast West". ISBN 0-319-21886-4.
* Office for National Statistics & Norfolk County Council (2001). " [http://www.norfolk.gov.uk/consumption/groups/public/documents/general_resources/ncc017867.xls Census population and household counts for unparished urban areas and all parishes] ". Retrieved December 2, 2005.http://www.northcoastal.co.uk/ -Information about Brancaster and the surrounding area by local historians.

External links

* [http://www.brancasterstaithe.co.uk Brancaster Staithe and Burnham Deepdale] - Guide to these two villages and the beautiful north Norfolk coast
* [http://www.origins.org.uk/genuki/NFK/places/b/brancaster/ Information from Genuki Norfolk] on Brancaster.
* [http://www.norfolkcoast.co.uk/location_norfolk/vp_brancaster.htm Norfolkcoast.co.uk] on Brancaster.
* [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1697 "Madam How and Lady Why"] by Charles Kingsley which mentions the petrified forest.
* [http://www.roundtowerchurches.de/Karte/A2/Burnham_Deepdale_St_Mary/burnham_deepdale_st_mary.html Website with photos of Burnham Deepdale St. Mary] , a Round-tower church
*http://www.letzersseafood.co.uk Fishing out of Brancaster Staithe from the Whitby Crest & Speedwell Local fisherman Simon Letzer catches Lobsters & Crabs many of which are sold to local restaurants and via the Crab Hut in Brancatser Staithe Harbour.