Postcard from Norfolk - Llama drama

Ever wondered why there were so many churches on the North Norfolk Coast?  Apparently, it’s all to do with an ostentatious display of wealth.  Before expensive divorces and second wives, wealthy businessmen used to spend their money endowing churches.  This achieved the triple whammy of showing everyone how successful you were, ensuring your name is remembered for posterity by having a family pew (remembered for posterior?) or a stained glass window and, of course, getting on the Fast track to heaven.

Wool, it would appear, used to be big business and the North Norfolk coast is ideally suited to tourism, and stupid white things who basically just stand around all day chewing, well, anything.  It was also easier to get your goods to Europe than it was London, thanks to conveniently located sea.

Apparently, people also got rich by piracy, smuggling and subjugating the agricultural workforce, but sheep make for a better subject for a picture in a window.

Today if you want to get rich on North Norfolk you, as far as I can determine, paint your food stall or café that blue/green sedge colour that everyone round here is nuts for, write the word ‘jus’ after every dish on your menu, and charge a fortune.  By the way, ‘locally sourced’ does not, as far as I am aware, mean obtained at the big Tesco in Hunstanton.

But there is still wool here.  Not so much for the sheep, who are pastured in the salt marshes with a view to becoming essentially self-seasoning main courses, but from the llamas.  OK, so there are only half a dozen of them in a field in Wells, but they do make a sight.

Christ alone knows what they make of Wells.  You don’t get much more sea-level than North Norfolk and for an animal used to living at altitude, like athletes in training or chalet maids, it must be something of a surprise to breath the fragrant air of the coast.  Not that they seem to mind.  In fact they don’t seem to mind anything.  Not even people taking pictures of them.

I’m not a huge fan of wildlife photography.  I can barely get friends or family to sit still long enough to take a photograph, and have no patience, so my snapshots of wildlife essentially consists of animals wandering away disinterestedly (although, oddly, one of my photographs was once used in a book about animals, so it just goes to show there’s a market for everything, even pictures of shy pigs).

That said, I enjoy the llamas of Wells-next-the-Sea.  Watching their owner (or a really, really confident looking rustler) walking them along the pavement is a joy to behold.  And it’s lovely to see an elegant creature up close, and downwind.