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Holiday home owners threaten decades-old way of life for Norfolk fishers

For the past 40 years, Richard Clarke has fished for lobsters, crab, herring and bass off the coast of Sea Palling in north Norfolk.Now, he fears his days as a fisher are numbered after a dispute with holiday home owners about whether he should be allowed to store his fishing boats in a boatyard he uses near their properties.North Norfolk district council (NNDC) has ruled that it is not lawful for fishers to continue to use the field off a road, the Marrams, to store casual boats for fishing and recreation, despite acknowledging that the site has been used by fishers for more than a decade to store their small vessels.“We will find it hard to continue our fishing operations if we don’t have the use of this field,” said Clarke, 55, a third-generation fisher who has been storing his boats in the small shingled yard near the sea for 35 years, alongside the boats of his brother Jason, another fisher. “It’s so important to us. Without it, we couldn’t operate – it would be the end of our fis…