Joyce Lambert

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Joyce Lambert (about 1917–2005), botanist and stratigrapher, showed that the Norfolk Broads are man-made, not natural.

In 1952, J.N. Jennings's book, The Origin Of The Broads, was published by the Royal Geographical Society. In it the stratigrapher concluded that most, if not all, of the Norfolk Broads had been formed by natural processes. But Jennings's apparently definitive interpretation was about to be spectacularly challenged.

His colleague, botanist and fellow stratigrapher Joyce Lambert, had also been investigating the Bure and Yare valley broads and fens. And she demonstrated that the lakes of the Norfolk Broads were not formed by nature, but had been created by our ancestors.

Using a smaller peat borer than the one employed by Jennings, Lambert obtained a series of closely spaced cores around the broads, and discovered - to her amazement - that what had been thought to be natural lakes had near-perpendicular walls; moreover, their floors, some three metres or so below the surface, were almost flat. Clearly, they had originated as peat diggings, whose angular shape had been concealed by the overgrowth of vegetation once they had filled up with water.

In 1952, Joyce gave the presidential address at the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society, and when editing that speech for publication, she inserted into it her new findings. These, together with a follow-up article in the Geographical Journal, caused a sensation. How could such extensive excavations have been dug by hand within areas of the flood plain now subject to regular inundation?