Well, this month was a bit of a bonanza – two excellent displays by the Photography and Needlecraft groups, a short but informative talk by Sam Clapton from Age UK and our main event, a Virtual Guide to Kings Lynn.

Michael Aldis is one of the town’s guides and ‘walked’ us through its streets and buildings. Lynn is an old word for a saltwater lake or pool and early settlers extracted salt from the water to trade. Bishops Lynn, as the town was originally known, traded in wine and timber imports whilst exporting grain and wool. It was Henry 8th who granted the name change in 1534. It was the Victorians who straightened the river so a bridge could be built.

Herbert de Losinga come over from France with William the Conqueror and paid the King a considerable sum of money to be consecrated and thus named the town Bishops Lynn. The pope was not best pleased with this ‘bribery’ and Herbert had to build the Priory Church of St Margaret or Lynn Minster and another Priory Church in Great Yarmouth. In effect the Bishop ruled the town which doubtless was a lucrative position.

Important buildings were clustered in the marketplace hence the Minster church and Trinity Guildhall which represented the court/government. The chequer board brick pattern is repeated in many of the old buildings such as Trinity Guildhall. Lynn Minster boasts a Tide Clock which shows the time of the high tide on a ‘clock’ face. This worked mechanically until 1741 when a great gale blew the spire down and the mechanism was damaged. However, restoration in the 1960’s means that the Tide Clock now works.

The use of the stone carved image of a pelican was also intriguing. This symbolised piety or self-sacrifice as a pelican will apparently peck off it’s breast feathers so that its young may feed on the parent’s blood if food is short.

In 2017 we went on a guided town walk in Kings Lynn and if there is enough interest we can organise another u3a trip to see the buildings in the ‘flesh’, so to speak, when the weather is warmer!