A day in Lowestoft

We walked in the general direction of Bell Vue Park and had tea and a tea cake at the Lighthouse Diner before looking around the Lowestoft Maritime Museum. Across the road are some strange wooden rails. It turns out that these are for drying herring drift nets.

This is a small, volunteer run museum with some outstanding exhibits. The model fishing boats are wonderful. Every block and line is faithfully reproduced. The variety of different shapes of top sail alone is fantastic. The museum also has the contents of Sir Christopher Cockerell's workshop, where, one assumes, the hovercraft was conceived. Also fun were the suits of the '48 hour millionaires' - young lads off the fishing boats in the 1950s with cash burning a hole in their pockets would order more and more extravagant made-to-measure suits in garish colours.

Another interesting feature of Lowestoft are the 'scores'. These are steep lanes running down from the high street to sea level. The word apparently is the same word score used for marking a line on a sheet of card or metal for cutting or bending. In earlier centuries some of these scores were infamous for cut-purses and worse.