Phillip McFadyen

"I’ve been Chaplain to the Broads for ten years now and never heard a bittern boom’. I made this confession at a supper party one evening last May. My host looked concerned even shocked. ‘How can this poor man hold his head up in polite society if he has never heard the boom of a bittern?’ I could see he was thinking. ‘You shall hear one now’ he declared and before I knew it I was swept away from my coffee, bundled into a Land Rover and was bouncing over the marshes into the murk of a May midnight. We walked a good half-mile in total silence without benefit of torchlight. The thought did cross my mind that I might be walking into an Agatha Christie novel. Would Miss Marple find us in the morning face down in a ditch? I put such unworthy concerns out of my head. It was far more important to concentrate on the present as Chinese water deer scuttled, widgeon took wing and mallards exploded at our feet. We stood still in one of the last wildernesses this country has to offer. It was pitch black, just a faint glow on the horizon towards St Benet’s, a mere coot call away. Then, right on cue, it happened - a low murmuring sound as if someone was blowing across the top of a beer bottle. I was transfixed and I knew that this was a moment that I would never forget. We were in the presence of a booming bittern.

"As Broads Chaplain I now felt I had arrived. I stood in the long tradition of those who had sailed these waters ever since the time the monks first came to settle on these marshes at the behest of king Canute. St Benet’s is the oldest monastic foundation in England and it stands sentinel over these wetlands witnessing to generations of seekers after solitude and stillness. We sometimes forget, in our noise and clamour, that for centuries our ancestors were able to hear and recognise sounds that we never hear because we are so distracted by the din of every day life. The Broads celebrates that heritage every year when the abbot of St Benet’s visits the abbey ruins of the only monastery in England not to be dissolved by Henry VIII. The bishops of Norwich have remained abbots of St Benet’s ever since Henry VIII appointed Abbot Rugge as his Bishop of Norwich.

"If the sound of a bittern booming below St Benet’s is bizarre then the sight of a bishop in full canonicals perched on the prow of a wherry is no less surprising. Yet that is what you will witness if you visit St Benet’s on the afternoon of the first Sunday in August when the Lord Abbot and Bishop sails into his abbey for his annual Visitation and open air service. Some years ago I took advantage of this spectacle to challenged the present bishop, Graham James, to a water borne race to the annual service. The reason was pragmatic; I needed to raise some money for toilets at St Lawrence’s Arts Centre at South Walsham. He sportingly took up the challenge and I’m glad to say was magnanimous in defeat as I pipped him to the post in my rowing dinghy while he bore down on me in his stately wherry below the ruined gate house of St Benet’s. Later, he graciously came to bless the completed, newly restored St Lawrence’s, which can now boast some of the best conveniences in Broadland.

"Such is the life of a Chaplain to the Broads. When I’m asked what the job involves, I’m tempted to say that it is a ministry of waving and smiling to people as I sail by on my chaplain’s boat ‘Wild Goose’. I do keep a log, which I enjoy, illustrating and filling with some of the bizarre events that I witness. The job has to be squeezed into the busy life of a country parson with five parishes and I’m lucky if I can get afloat two or three times a month. However, that experience is a total delight and an opportunity to draw closer to the silence of this wilderness in which the voice of God can boom like that of a mysterious bittern.

"The annual St Benet’s service will take place this year on Sunday 3rd August at 3.15pm.