Looking for Bach in Cromer
Through history, landscapes and plants
I. A promise made last September
Some journeys begin long before you arrive. Long before setting foot in Cromer, I had already begun the journey through Nora Weeks' biography, Mary Tabor's forgotten novel, and the Cromer Museum's own guides. I expected confirmation. Instead, I came back with new questions too, and a real sense of how much of that landscape still remains.
I returned from Cromer only a few days ago. Not with certainties, but with something more valuable: a landscape that now has texture, colour, scent and light — no longer just pages, but sand, gorse, salt on my lips.
A year ago, in a September post, I first mentioned this idea: following Bach's footsteps to Cromer, not to retell a biography already written elsewhere, but to see for myself what remained of that landscape. This journey fulfilled that promise.
We had no fixed itinerary — only the sources we had already studied, and the freedom to explore, to change direction, to take a wrong path, to linger wherever something caught our attention. That freedom, I think, is what made every small discovery feel larger. Surprise mattered as much as confirmation.
II. Two houses, one plaque, and a long silence
Two addresses in Cromer still bear witness to Edward Bach's years on the Norfolk coast: 4 St Mary's Road, where he stayed during the non-winter months, and 4 Brunswick Terrace, his winter residence — as the Cromer Museum's official guide records:
Today, the blue plaque from Cromer Town Council tells the same story in a few spare lines: Edward Bach, 1886-1936, Homeopath & spiritual writer, Lived in Cromer 1930-1934. Standing in front of that plaque felt like touching one of the few tangible traces the town still keeps of him — because, as the same museum notes:
Walking those quiet streets, past neat hedges and bay windows, it is hard to imagine that right here — a few hundred metres from the sea — one of the most cited episodes in Bach's entire biography took place.
III. The fisherman, the storm, the Rescue Remedy
There is one episode that links Cromer to Bach more than any other, and I found it recounted in a cutting from the North Norfolk News of 11 December 2003, on display at the Bach Centre, although one detail in the article calls for a small clarification.
On 13 December 1933, the sailing barge Sepoy ran aground a few hundred metres from Cromer beach, on a stormy night. Coxswain Henry Blogg — the most decorated lifeboatman in RNLI history — led the crew of the lifeboat H.F. Bailey in one of the most dramatic rescues ever to take place on this stretch of coast, watched by hundreds gathered on the cliffs above. According to Nora Weeks's biography of Bach, quoted in the article, the doctor joined the rescue effort:
and shortly afterwards the man "was sitting up and in his right mind, asking for a cigarette."
The museum dedicated to Henry Blogg, which holds this memory, was closed for refurbishment when we visited — a locked door onto a story that quietly intertwines with Bach's own. His name is also remembered elsewhere in town: at St Peter and St Paul's Church, whose tower, the tallest parish church tower in Norfolk, served as a landmark for sailors long before the present lighthouse was built. A memorial beneath the tower still bears his name.
If the Sepoy tells the story of Bach the man of action — the one who kneels beside an exhausted body and simply acts — there is another Bach I had already carried with me before setting out: the one told through the words of those who stood beside him, day after day.
Nora Weeks and the seven Cromer discoveries
Weeks's own account — The Medical Discoveries of Edward Bach, Physician (C.W. Daniel, 1940) — remains the most important first-hand account of his fieldwork at Cromer. Bach arrived here in August 1930, after a period in Wales, and began at once his systematic study of the local flora and of human types.
It was in the autumn of that same year that he discovered seven of his remedies. Weeks is precise: "all these plants, except one, grew along the roads and in the fields around Cromer" — ordinary wildflowers, not botanical rarities. Agrimony along field margins. Chicory in the cornfields, in full bloom. Vervain at the foot of an old stone wall. Clematis, abundant on hedgerows near the town. Centaury in the coastal meadows, close to the sea. Scleranthus, the last of the season, among the wheat stubble in late September — a tiny plant with pearl-green flowers.
The single exception — the only one of the twelve remedies not found growing wild in England — is Cerato: Weeks recounts that Bach found it in a village garden near the sea, an ornamental plant originally from Tibet, and that he asked the owner's permission before picking its flowers. There is no documentary evidence to confirm this, but the most likely candidate is Pleasaunce, the Overstrand estate designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1899, where Ceratostigma willmottianum still grows today — we passed by it ourselves, and found it closed.
Three years later, in the spring of 1933, Weeks leaves the only precise geographical detail from the whole Norfolk period: the Oak flowers were gathered — as she writes — from a group of trees growing among the ruins of the ancient Roman camp at Felbrigg, near Cromer. Not one solitary ancient oak, then, but a small woodland growing across the site of the Roman Camp.
Of Bach the man, more than the researcher, what remains is the testimony of a fisherman friend, Jack Davies, again quoted by Weeks: "I liked him so much for the way he was always ready... rich or poor, it did not matter to him." Mary Tabor, another colleague from Mount Vernon, dedicated a 1938 novel to him "in deep gratitude for his living example."
That same landscape became the map I carried in my pocket.
V. Walking the remedies
The botanical landscape Bach walked through in the 1930s has not stood still. Looking for it today means watching the ground more than the horizon, learning to distinguish a serrated leaf from a lobed one, and accepting that not everything has survived intact.
Towards Felbrigg, among the wheat fields and the woodland edge, Chicory grew freely — large clumps of blue, star-shaped flowers, open only in the brightest hours of the day. The Great Wood holds a good number of mature oaks, and only later, back among the sources, did I realise I had not been looking for a single tree: Weeks writes that the flowers were gathered from a group of trees among the ruins of the Roman Camp at Felbrigg. Whether we actually stood on the very spot remains an open question — but knowing now that it was a small woodland, not one solitary specimen, changes how I would look for it on a return visit. The same wood holds holly, glossy and spined, and beech, its leaves smooth to the touch.
Chicory
Oak
Holly
Beech
Among the oaks and beeches, I also photographed a tree with long, cream-coloured catkins and serrated, lance-shaped leaves — consistent with Sweet Chestnut, which the National Trust officially lists among the Great Wood's trees. Its unusually glossy foliage, however, leaves open the possibility of a related Asian variety, often planted in historic English gardens alongside the European species. I cannot say for certain which this particular tree was, but Sweet Chestnut's presence in the wood is documented, not merely my own guess.
I lingered longer by that chestnut than by any other tree. A simple exercise: centring, approaching the tree with respect, resting my hands on the trunk. It belongs to my personal practice rather than to botany, so I offer it simply as a personal experience, not as a general truth: I felt strength, groundedness. My travelling companion did the same exercise, on the same tree, and came away with an entirely different experience of her own.
Between the lighthouse and Overstrand, Gorse grew everywhere, in three stages at once on the same bush: flowers still golden and open, brown seed pods already burst into spirals, the evergreen spines beneath. A direct confirmation of the old saying that gorse blooms almost year-round on this coast. Nearby, a stretch of Clematis had not yet flowered — and the same held further inland, in the countryside: not yet in bloom there either.
Gorse
Clematis
Honeysuckle
At East Runton, where historical sources place the discovery of Agrimony, Chicory and Scleranthus, the farmland — cultivated fields, thick hedgerows, the grassy ridge above the sea — has stayed true to itself. Of Scleranthus, though, there was no trace, in any field, along any margin. This was no surprise: the species is listed as Near Threatened in East Norfolk by the Plant Atlas 2020 — its absence on the ground is consistent with a decline already recorded in the botanical data.
Each plant we found confirmed something we had previously known only from the sources. The absence of one, though, proves nothing on its own: we did not comb every field, every margin, every season. What remains is neither confirmation nor denial, but an open question worth returning to.
VI. A changing town, an ancient coast
Cromer today is not Bach's Cromer. The seafront — the pastel-coloured houses, the pier, the lighthouse that comes alive at dusk — has grown and changed over the years, and the caravan parks dotting the coast towards East Runton and beyond certainly did not exist in the 1930s. And yet the stretch of coast between the lighthouse and Overstrand, its cliffs shaped by the glacial deposits of the Cromer Till — dating to the Anglian glaciation, some 450,000 years ago — remains the same landscape Bach wandered through, as Nora Weeks describes, studying each plant, sitting beside it, watching it through every stage of growth, "in sunshine and in rain, in early morning and late evening" — discovering seven of his remedies along the way. Walking there, it was hard not to sense the depth of time in those cliffs.
Further down, in still older layers — the Cromer Forest-bed, some 700,000 years old, distinct from and older than the Cromer Till — the same cliffs, a little further west at West Runton, yielded in 1990 eighty-five per cent of the skeleton of a steppe mammoth: the most complete ever found in Britain, now partly on display at the Cromer Museum. According to the region's official tourist board, these cliffs are considered among the best places in the UK to study glacial geology. This is the same stretch of coast that now carries the official name Deep History Coast — the name I had seen, without grasping its meaning at the time, on the sign at Cromer station.
Cromer, East Runton, Felbrigg Hall — all of them still show, visibly, a time that would have vanished elsewhere.
Sitting today at the Red Lion feels like stepping into one of the few places that still hold something of Cromer's atmosphere from the 1930s. The same feeling stayed with me throughout the town — in the way locals, almost always out walking their dogs, greeted us in the street with a kindness that seemed to belong to another era. They greeted us, and we gladly returned their greeting, feeling seen and welcomed.
I came home with the photographs, the checked quotations, the plants photographed one by one. But the question that stayed with me for the whole journey was no longer what I would find — it was what to do, now, with everything I had found. Had I not begun this research, Cromer would probably have remained, for me, a name read in books. Now it has the colour of the cliffs, the smell of the sea, the paths I walked on foot. The time we had was short — perhaps too short. Nothing, though, prevents me from returning.
VII. Closing
It was the first thing I looked for, as soon as we arrived in town. The plaque is small, blue, fixed to a red brick wall on an ordinary residential street. A few lines: a name, two dates, two words — homeopath & spiritual writer — and the exact years, 1930-1934. No crowd, no sign pointing the way. Just this circle of metal, and an invitation to look further: "Find his story at Cromer Town Museum."
Many photographs of that plaque already exist online. But this one, I took myself.
Article and photographs by Tamara Macelloni — June 2026
Sources and references
Primary sources
- Nora Weeks, The Medical Discoveries of Edward Bach, Physician (1940; later editions C.W. Daniel / Keats Publishing) — available via controlled digital lending on the Internet Archive (not a free download)
- Mary Tabor, To Thine Own Self (C.W. Daniel Company, 1938) — full text freely downloadable from bachcentre.com
- Cromer Museum, Guide n.19 — Dr Edward Bach, The Bach Flower Remedies, by Del Styan and Rochelle Mortimer Massingham
- North Norfolk News, 11 December 2003, "A gripping tale of heroism, drama and a healthy dose of Bach's Rescue Remedy", by Alex Hurrell
- Tamara Macelloni, "From China to the Bach Remedies: the journey of Cerato", newsametista.blogspot.com, March 2025
Scientific sources
- Plant Atlas 2020 / BSBI (Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland), vc28 East Norfolk — on the conservation status of Scleranthus annuus
- Geological Society of London, "Cromer Glacio-tectonic Folds" (100 Great Geosites) — geolsoc.org.uk
- Stuart, A.J. & Lister, A.M., "The West Runton Freshwater Bed and the West Runton Mammoth: Summary and conclusions", Quaternary International
Institutions
- National Trust, Felbrigg Hall, Gardens and Estate — nationaltrust.org.uk — official map available as a free PDF download
- Woodland Trust, Felbrigg Estate — Great Wood — woodlandtrust.org.uk
- Visit North Norfolk, "Top Five Facts about the West Runton Mammoth on the Deep History Coast" — visitnorthnorfolk.com
- Visit North Norfolk, "Deep History Coast" — visitnorthnorfolk.com/deep-history-coast
- National Churches Trust / Exploring Norfolk Churches, "St Peter and St Paul's Church, Cromer"
Intrecci di Conoscenza (Intertwined Knowledge)
"Looking for Bach in Cromer" is the first research report in a series dedicated to the places, sources and landscapes connected to the life and work of Edward Bach.
