I’ll start at Black Tower or Boteliers or Butlers tower in Bracondale and continue in no particular order. This was also known as Snuff Tower because it contained a snuff mill, and later a cotton mill which were still in evidence at the beginning of nineteenth century in painting by members of the Norwich School including John Crome, it’s doubled up as plenty of things over the years including a pest house for Lepers. And later became known as Mackarel’s tower after it’s then owner.
You can walk round it with ease and it’s worth it, exceptionally complete in many ways. I would very much like to go into the cool green of the tower itself, but you can’t, because it’s got a gate on it, which presumably stops rough sleepers, street drinkers and drug addicts from messing up the weed and rubbish strewn interior or disturbing the hundreds of pigeons who live in it, it’s a pity really, there’s nothing much better than touching a bit of history, even if you need to wear surgical gloves to stop psittacosis and hepatitis.
I particularly like the fact that you can see the platform/walkway and an entry point into the tower from it, complete with one crenelation and the long run of surviving arches, which soldiers would have huddled in out of the drizzle to not have a fag, because smoking hadn’t been imported yet. I suspect on a cold night they wouldn’t have had a baked potato either as they hadn’t been imported yet either, nor had cocoa or lager so it sounds increasingly bleak. Maybe they quaffed some small beer a packet of broad beans and a boiled turnip while grumbling about the boss making them sharpen staves all day. I would. One of the more complete sections, this area appears to have not been routinely built against over the last 700 years, so it’s in quite good condition and nicely hidden up in quite verdant woodland with nice views across the valley and the city.
The section sort of has a posh side which is quite intact and shows how tall it was, I mean you could fling quite a lot at it without it causing anyone on the inside a major problem up here. Most of the sacking had been done by the time we finally built the thing. Interesting to note the earliest traces of defensive ditches have been found in the vicinity of Anglia Square car parks, the ones at the back of it, presumably the Anglo Saxons were trying to repel a huge attack by various Norman discount stores and Viking ‘less-than-a-krona’ shops.
For scale you can see how high this section stands compared to the bloke, it’s a fair old drop. I mean you could fling a cow over it, but a pogo stick isn’t going to scare the burghers of Norwich much. This area suffered a bit during one of the very early raids of the Second World War, a bomb landed very near the towers.
February 2015