A few weeks ago Rex Hancy was talking on the Radio about Cawston Heath; he was up there looking at a piece of land they were turning back to heath land. The next week he wrote in the EDP a letter on the same subject stating that he would like to hear from anyone who remembered the heath in the twenties, so I phoned him up as I remember it when I was a boy in the twenties, when we had the summer holidays all the mothers round here put the little ones in their prams and us older ones used to walk up to the heath for an afternoon treat. This was at the time the Army had a firing range on the left hand side of the roadway.

During the late twenties the Army had to move out to the range at Horsford, because the bullets were going over the top of the butts and landing on people and houses in Allison Street, Marsham, this meant that the parish lost a bit of money. There used to be enough money coming in from that and other rights to give what they called Heath Money, this was paid out at the school on the first Saturday in February, it was 10/- (50p) each family, but not if you owned your house, it was discontinued several years ago.

Going back to the time we used to go up the Heath we filled bags of fir cones, my mother liked them to light the fire they were brought home on the fronts of the prams. There was a sand hole just inside the heath where anyone could go and get a load of sand, and we used to get our Christmas trees off there.

I hadn't been on the Heath for about twenty years so I decided to go up there and have a walk across from Marsham end with my mate Geoff. He was on strange ground. I was surprised to see it grown­up so much, it didn't look like the old heath that I new.

Just for people of my age, you must remember Dolly Sampson (Hill), when we went to Cawston School, she came to see me last summer.

Denny Easton

From the Cawston Parish Magazine April 1997