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1 `The Landscape’ – North Wootton, South Wootton and Castle Rising The Context North Wootton, South Wootton and Castle Rising occupy a substantial portion of the area of modest, but in the context of Norfolk quite prominent, upland, defined by the lower courses of the Babingley and Gaywood Rivers. Parts of King’s Lynn (the ‘absorbed’ parish of Gaywood), Roydon and Hillington extend into this upland area. Parish boundaries have been modified from time to time. For example South Wootton acquired a small strip of Roydon parish when the A149 bypass was constructed. More significantly both South and North Wootton were expanded when the outflow of the River Great Ouse was diverted by the ‘Estuary Cut’ in the mid nineteenth century. The eastern limit of the area is further defined by the ‘lowland mire’ of Roydon Common. There is clearly contrast between the landscape of the substantially sub-urbanised, but still distinctive parish of South Wootton, and that of the essentially rural village of Castle Rising. Here modern development has been limited to three small estates. The character of North Wootton, also with considerable estate development, has more in common with South Wootton than it does with Castle Rising. However, both Woottons retain significant areas of agrarian landscape as yet unaffected by the amorphous and undistinguished sprawl that largely defines Gaywood. One part of South Wootton’s present southern boundary abuts Reffley Wood, or rather a large disused clay pit on its edge. The habitat of this area of semi-natural yet still, in part, ancient woodland would be particularly under threat of engulfment from any further development on or close to its boundaries. Geology, Mineral Resources, Topography and Soils:- The surface geology of the area between the Gay and Babingley rivers has been complicated by a combination of glacial action, together with the much more recent deposition of marine and estuarine silts. The underlying solid geology consists, in the area closest to the Wash, of deposits of ‘Kimmeridge Clay’ of the Upper Jurassic. When the most significant stream in South Wootton, once known as Stones Brook, and to the west of Nursery Lane, as St Katherine’s Creek, was dredged a few years ago this blue grey clay was exposed in its bed. When Melford Close, (just in King’s 2 Lynn/Gaywood) was being built several large ammonites, derived from this clay, were brought to the surface. The underlying Jurassic beds are covered by a mix of glacial drift deposits including sand, gravel and boulder clay. In our area this ‘till’ largely consists of eroded Lower Cretaceous sands. Most of this material is ‘un- cemented’ and has been quarried extensively. For much of the nineteenth century the pits in ‘Wootton Woods’ (in fact located in Castle Rising parish) were the source of sand carried on a horse-powered tramway to small barges that utilised a creek in North Wootton marshes. The embankment that carried this tramway survives as a feature in the landscape of North Wootton close to ‘The Priory’. North Wootton drained marsh. A section of the embankment of the 19th century tramway built to enable sand quarried in Castle Rising pits to be loaded on to barges utilising a creek . This tramway was cut by the railway and may then have become largely disused. Located in both Castle Rising and Hillington Parishes there were formerly significant outcrops of grey weathering quartzitic quartz sandstone. This stone was used for building by both Romano-British and Medieval stonemasons. Its initial use was in the construction of the Roman fort at Brancaster (Branodunum) and in another major Roman structure at Reedham. Its medieval use was in St Lawrence Church and the castle, Castle Rising, St Mary’s Church, South Wootton and, almost certainly, in North Wootton’s demolished medieval church. Considerable quantities can also be seen in post medieval walls and buildings, particularly in Castle Rising parish. Carstone, an iron-rich sandstone, and conglomerates (natural gravelly concretions formed by mineralised water leaching through gravels) were also encountered in pits dug either for road surfacing material or, especially in Roman times, to obtain iron- rich limonite nodules for smelting. These conglomerates were also used by early medieval church builders. They form a substantial proportion of the fabric of St Mary’s Church, South Wootton. Carstone is also widely present in post medieval buildings in all three parishes. Its use became particularly fashionable during the 3 Victorian period. In contrast to much of Norfolk, little use of flint has been made in the locality. The soils of more than half of the Woottons, and the parts of Castle Rising and Gaywood closest to the two rivers, consist of the calcareous silts and clays characteristic of the West Norfolk Marshland. These areas of silt, which extend well beyond the limits of the medieval salt marshes that bordered the former outflow both of the Ouse and of its more modest predecessor, have been added to both North and South Wootton through a combination of processes. In Castle Rising the tidal limit originally extended to the east of what is now the A 149. Both the Wash and the Babingley River estuaries have been silting since post-glacial climatic changes raised sea levels to approximately those of today by around 7,000 BC. Human intervention through the creation of saltern mounds in Saxon and Medieval times, the construction of Medieval and Post Medieval sea banks, and, during the 1850s, the digging of the ‘Estuary Channel’ from Lynn to the Wash, has transformed salt marsh, some of which could be grazed seasonally, into highly productive arable land. It was this that added considerably to the area of South Wootton Parish. The parish boundary of South Wootton extended, from the 1850s, as far as the new outflow of the Ouse. Both South and North Wootton parishes include tracts of un-reclaimed salt marsh. A distinctive element of the landscape of all three parishes is provided by drained salt marsh through which the river and its creeks once ran. Some of this reclaimed salt marsh, in particular North Wootton Common, and some of the other former marsh shared between North Wootton and Castle Rising has never been ploughed. It retains ‘fossilised’ creeks and, along side these creeks, enigmatic embanked circles of uncertain date and function. Some have been preserved, others destroyed by ploughing. 4 An ‘extinct creek’ on North Wootton Marsh. This marsh was formerly part of the Babingley estuary. To the right and overlooking the creek is one of several ‘embanked circles’. Earlier than the late or post medieval sea bank they have been variously interpreted as cattle refuges, hay stack bases, or settling/evaporation containers for brine. Similar structures in Hilgay seem to be Romano-British in date. The ‘Higher ‘ Land The soils of the ‘uplands’, that is of those areas that always lay beyond the reach of the highest tides even before any protective embanking took place, vary considerably. They are glacial drift deposits, predominantly of sands and gravels but with, here and there, patches of boulder clay. An appreciation of the topography, drainage and soils of the higher ground between the two rivers is important to a proper understanding of where settlement took place and why. The settled areas North Wootton, South Wootton and Castle Rising, together with that part of Gaywood parish known as Reffley (perhaps the reeve’s wood, as there is no clear evidence for it having been a medieval ‘hamlet of Gaywood’), all lie within this modest upland but close to the boundary between the drift and estuarine deposits. Here the drift deposits are shallow with springs and water-logging making some parts unsuitable for either settlement or cultivation. This, for example, explains the survival of South Wootton’s extensive ‘Green’. What governed the location of village settlements was the need to exploit both upland and salt marsh environments. North Wootton ‘Common’. Once ‘salt marsh’ now pasture protected by the post medieval sea bank. The ‘earthwork’ in the middle distance is a Late Saxon ‘saltern mound’. Created by raking up salt impregnated silt during salt making these mounds occur widely in the salt marsh in all three parishes. 5 Drainage Down the western slopes of the upland springs emerge to provide ample water supplies. The area once bordering the tidal marshes in which settlement took place in the Woottons is relatively small, but it is large enough for two significant westward flowing streams to traverse it. The more northerly, emerges from Wootton Woods to flow in part along the edge of Wootton Park; it marks the boundary between the two parishes as it crosses the drained marsh. A second stream drains the south eastern part of the woods in South Wootton and the low lying area below and to the west of Knights Hill. It crosses Castle Rising Road close to the junction with Priory Lane. Here it was known as ‘Stones Brook’, at least when Faden undertook his survey for the first large scale map of Norfolk published in 1790. Earlier the estuary of this stream was known as St Katherine’s Creek. It appears as such on the map of Rising Chase dating to the 1580s when, assuming that this map can be trusted, it was still tidal, perhaps to the point where it is now crossed by Nursery Lane in South Wootton. The view to the west from Nursery Lane across a varied landscape including both arable land and pasture remains, despite the intrusive presence of a telephone mast, impressive. Less obviously, because it has been extensively ‘piped’, a third stream fed by springs on the ‘Green’ marks, for some part of its course, the boundary between South Wootton and Kings Lynn.

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