Welcome to Sweet Briar Marshes
Please note there are three identical information boards on this reserve, so you may have already heard this description.
Click here for an audio description of the artwork
Click here to listen to a full-length version of the poem on the artwork
Transcript
Welcome to NWT Sweet Briar Marshes
You are at an illustrated information board. The wording at the top of the board says Welcome to NWT Sweet Briar Marshes: This is your place. Our place. People and nature together.
Fine hand drawn illustrations capture the different habitats and wildlife here, as well as people enjoying Sweet Briar Marshes on a summer’s day. We are shown the view over the nature reserve towards Marriot’s Way – you can just make out the grey chimneys of Sweet Briar Chemical factory on the industrial estate beyond. Just visible in the top left corner, at the point where the water flows beneath the iron bridge on Mariott’s Way, is the River Wensum.
A wide hard path with kick rails connects Marlpit Gate (nearest to the Iron Bridge) with Mile Cross Gate at the other end. The path passes through a short tunnel that goes beneath the busy road that bisects this reserve. A man is shown coming out of this tunnel, he is using a white cane and has a guide dog. We worked closely with groups such as Inclusive Norwich and Vision Norfolk on the design of Sweet Briar Marshes.
The illustration shows some of the 200 flowering plants at Sweet Briar Marshes, such as the feathery purple flower spikes of the common reed, and sunshine yellow creeping buttercups. A red admiral butterfly rests on flowering gorse, which can be found across the reserve. Gorse has vibrant, coconut-scented flowers that bloom from January to June. Singing from a bramble is a common whitethroat, one of the many birds to migrate here in the summer.
The sign also contains the logos of Norfolk Wildlife Trust, who own and manage the reserve, project partners Aviva who have supported the reserve both financially and through volunteering and the logo of Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts – the national federation to which Norfolk Wildlife Trust belongs.
Full length poem by Nick Acheson: transcript
This is your place.
This is a place where your roots can reach into the ground.
This is a place where children can fill their ears and their hearts with birdsong.
This is a place where it’s fine to sit on the grass with a book or stare at the wiggling lives in a pond.
This is a place where nature is free for everyone.
This is our place
We are the plants and animals, the fungi and lichens, who live here.
The woods and the hedges, the ditches and grassland are our homes.
Many of us are rare. Many of us survive only in quiet corners of the countryside, like nature reserves.
By visiting Sweet Briar Marshes you can help us.
Every person who visits a wild place with love and respect is a voice for nature.
This is a connected place. Connected through time and space.
The River Wensum is born in the northwest of Norfolk and flows to sea with the Yare at Great Yarmouth. Billions of plant and animal lives are lived in its reedbeds and marshes.
Sweet Briar Marshes is one of a priceless chain of wild places along the river.
The story of the River Wensum stretches deep into the past. The chalk from which it springs is made of plankton which lived in a warm and shallow sea here, tens of millions of years ago.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, glaciers scoured this landscape, leaving the sands and gravels for which the valley is known today.
For centuries, people have loved and cared for this place. They have grazed their livestock here and grown their crops.
Today, with your help, Norfolk Wildlife Trust cares for this precious place and for its wildlife.