Swaffham is a market town and civil
parish in the English
county of Norfolk.
The town
is situated east of King's
Lynn
and west of Norwich
.
The civil parish has an area of and in the
2001 census had a population of
6,935 in 3,130 households.
For the purposes of local government, the
parish falls within the district of Breckland
.
History
The Rotunda Swaffham market
place.
Its name came from
Old English
Swǣfa hām = "the homestead of the
Swabians"; some of them presumably came with the
Angles and
Saxons. In
the
Domesday Book three lords were
associated with Swaffham: Walter Giffard, with the largest manor;
his tenant Hugh Bolebec, who held all of the Giffard land there;
and
Aubrey de Vere I, who held a
smaller manor at Swaffham which the
Domesday jurors said Aubrey had seized without the
king's permission. As the Bolebec estates passed into Vere hands
through two marriages of Bolebec heiresses to Vere males in the
late
12th and early
13th centuries, the two manors were combined
and held by the Vere
Earls of Oxford
for several centuries.
A
Benedictine priory for female
religious was founded at Swaffham Bolebec between
circa
1150 and 1163, probably by the Bolebecs.
About 8 km to the north of Swaffham can be found the ruins
of the formerly important Castle Acre Priory
and Castle Acre Castle
.
By the
14th and
15th centuries Swaffham had a flourishing
sheep and
wool industry As
a result of this prosperity, the town has a large market place. The
Market Cross here was built by George Walpole, 3rd
Earl of Orford and presented to the town in
1783. On the top is the statue of
Ceres, the Roman goddess of the
harvest.
On the west side of Swaffham Market Place are several old buildings
which for many years housed the historic Hamond's
Grammar School, as a plaque on the wall of
the main building explains.
The Hamond's Grammar School building used to
serves as the sixth form for the Hamond's High
School
. Harry Carter, the school's art teacher, was
responsible for a great number of the carved
village signs that are now found in many of
Norfolk's towns and villages, most notably perhaps Swaffham's own
sign commemorating the legendary
Pedlar of Swaffham, which is in the
corner of the market place just opposite the old school's gates.
Harry was the nephew of the archaeologist
Howard Carter.
Until 1968
it had a railway
station
on the Great
Eastern Railway line from King's Lynn. Just after Swaffham, the line split into two,
one branch heading south to Thetford
, and the
other west towards Dereham
.
The
railways were closed as part of the Beeching Axe, through the possibility of
rebuilding a direct rail link from Norwich to King's Lynn via Swaffham is occasionally raised.
Ecotech Centre
The Ecotech Centre
Today the town is known for the presence of two large
Enercon E-66
wind
turbines, and the associated Ecotech Centre. The turbines are
owned and operated by
Ecotricity, and
together generate more than 3
Megawatts.
One wind turbine boasts an
observation
deck just below the
nacelle.
These have
now been joined now by a further eight turbines at North
Pickenham
.
Kingdom (TV series)
In the summer of 2006, location filming was done in the town for
the
ITV1 series
Kingdom, starring
Stephen Fry. In
Kingdom the town is
called
Market Shipborough. The
pub
The Startled Duck in the TV series is better known as
The Greyhound Inn in which the
Earl of Orford created the first
coursing club open to the public in
1776.
Kingdom's office is filmed in Oakleigh
House, near the town square, with the coastal scenes filmed at
Wells-next-the-Sea
on the north Norfolk coast.
Roads
Swaffham fire station.
The east-west
A47 Birmingham to Great Yarmouth
road now avoids the town, using a northerly bypass opened in
1981. The
A1065 Mildenhall to Fakenham
road still passes through the centre of the town on its
north-south route, intersecting with the A47 at a
grade separated junction north of the
town.
Notable present and former residents
- William
Methwold (1590 - 1653) born South Pickenham
, English East India
Company merchant.
- Howard Carter, archaeologist who
discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun
- Stephen Fry, actor and writer
- W.E. Johns,
author of the "Biggles" books
- Christopher Dawes, author of
Rat Scabies And The
Holy Grail
- Michael
Carroll, lottery winner
- Sir Arthur Knyvet Wilson,
VC, GCB, OM, GCVO (1842 – 1921), First Sea Lord.
References
External links
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