Norfolk & Norwich Festival Announce Norfolk Wonder Walk Packs

This autumn Norfolk & Norwich Festival is presenting three brand new artist-led audio walks in towns on the coast, inspired by King's Lynn, Cromer and Great Yarmouth.

Each walk is accompanied by a specially designed, limited edition Norfolk Wonder Walk Packs containing instructions, maps and specially crafted materials to take walkers on an immersive journey around the county. The walks, which go on sale on 21 October, are part of a Norfolk County Council autumn and winter tourism initiative. Full information can be found at nnfestival.org.uk.

Artists French and Mottershead explore how animals, plants, and fungi survive winter in Lull, an audio walk that will help audiences prepare to do the same, delivered in partnership with Lynn Museum. Starting from outside Lynn Museum, the town becomes a habitat for life around you that you can and cannot see. Lull is experienced through a spoken narrative streamed to listeners' smartphones. It has been written using insights gathered from local entomologists, botanists, and ecologists, combined with site research on overwintering strategies and habitats.

Each magical Lull walk pack contains instructions to access the Lull audio, accompanied by materials that help illustrate or elaborate on data or anecdotes locating the walk in King's Lynn. The pack includes a map of habitats, a fold-out of animal tracks and average life expectancies, day length and temperature charts for Astronomical and Meteorological Winter, an image of a Peacock Butterfly, and a Brown Long-Eared Bat for the palm of your hand.

Sarah Lowndes' The Sea Cure, in partnership with Cromer Museum, invites audiences to follow in the Empress Elizabeth of Austria's footsteps in Cromer, 1887, where she had come to convalesce, a spot that to this day people still come to from afar for restorative holidays, walking along the clifftops, hunting for fossils on the beach and bathing in the sea.

This 45 minute long audio walk uses archival music, field recordings and reflections on sea bathing for wellbeing through recent centuries. It guides listeners through the winding lanes and promenades of Cromer, in a one mile loop route which traces a vivid re-imagining of the Empress' visit. Revered as the most beautiful woman in Europe, she adhered to rigorous diets, remedies and procedures to maintain her constitution and her looks. In Cromer, she tried to come to terms with the loss of her infant daughter, a grief that had haunted her all her adult life, walking for miles along the clifftops, reading poetry and hunting for fossils on the beach and bathing in the sea. The Sea Cure invites listeners to follow in Elizabeth's footsteps in a remarkable town where visitors still flock for the health-giving waters of the North Sea.

In Great Yarmouth, Ela Orleans' Postcard Memories, in partnership with Time and Tide Museum, presents music and soundscape interwoven with stories told by the locals all also presented on a beautiful printed map. The pack also comes with a box of stamped postcards with pictures from the memories walk. Participants will visit five points on Ela's hand drawn map, each of which corresponds to one of the postcards. Audiences are encouraged to stop and reflect who they will send these too, postcards often being precious physical tokens from loved ones.

All three of the packs contain audio that is accessible via a smartphone using a QR code. There are a limited number of physical packs, just 100 per location, but audio and maps can be accessed online once these limited edition pieces run out.

The walk packs are part of Norfolk Wonder, a trio of specially presented events across the county this autumn from Norfolk & Norwich Festival. The Norfolk Wonder programme is a part of EXPERIENCE, a Norfolk County Council initiative designed to attract audiences to Norfolk for experiential tourism in the autumn and winter.

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