Mardler June 2018 JS

Local History
Brockdish and Thorpe Abbotts: Our Valiant Heritage.
© Elaine Murphy, Tim Brook and Margaret Brook.
We were just chatting together at the first meeting at the new
Waveney Heritage Centre about members of a local 19 th century
family called Valiant. That led us to look further for clues to their
history, where they lived and what happened to them. That’s
really the point of joining a heritage group; members spark each
other off and combine their expertise to deepen local knowledge.
Initially we knew just a few snippets. Tim and Margaret had
discovered, from exploring the newspaper archives, that in 1872,
a 21 month old toddler, Clara Valiant, had drowned ‘in a moat’ in
Brockdish. It caught their eye because the name Valiant features
amongst the deeds of their cottage. And Elaine knew that there
had been a well-known watch and clockmaker called Samuel
Valiant who lived and worked in Brockdish in the mid 19 th
century. It seemed likely they were related.
Little Clara was at the house of her uncle David Valiant, aged 20,
also a watchmaker, when the tragedy occurred; her mother Mary
Ann (or Marian) was in the garden, probably looking after her
younger baby Laura. Her uncle was in his workshop. From the
1871 census it seemed likely that the house was somewhere
near the centre of the village. But there are no moats in that
location….or was there a moat there at one time?
The Tithe Map of 1840, showing every parcel of land in the
village, indeed shows a moat, an L-shaped body of water behind
Rosebrook and ending at Rose Cottage, plot number 374, owned
then by the Walne family at The Grove. A similar shape can be
seen on the 1879 Ordnance Survey map and was still there on
the 1956 OS map. But the moat has now disappeared on modern
maps, perhaps filled in to give more garden space or was it thought
a hazard to other children?
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