Poring over yesterdays’ newspapers smoothed into bottom of drawers or boxes brought swift solace to domestic childhood chores for those of us too easily diverted from overdue sorting operations.

The malady lingers on when it comes to launching yet another attempt to conquer the north face of a mountain of books. magazines and documents blocking a path to my study desk.

A tinge of guilt and a tingle of excitement surface together as the first minute reveals old friends left to fade and gather dust along with more recent fancies still awaiting proper attention. Least I can do is afford them piles of their own.

So begins latest chapter in an endless scaling of literary ranges in search of knowledge, inspiration and useful companions to help make sense of a world in which real books and joined-up writing are often being reduced to bit-part players.

I bought a rather crumpled edition of The Land of the Vikings by H V Morton several years ago. It was first published in 1928, shortly after his best-selling In Search of England, a volume worthy of establishing him as one of the leading travel writers of the age.

Henry Vollam Morton’s style is too flowery and jingoistic for many tastes, but he did evoke stirring images and values of a time and an environment difficult to scoff at from a recession-wracked era, clouded even more by climate change worries in the third decade of the 21st century.

As a sudden  autumnal squall of wind and rain banged on my window, I renewed acquaintance with the Vikings and that part of England known as to our Saxon ancestors as the Danelaw between the Thames and Humber. Perhaps anticipating the vagaries of “local “television servers with outstretched arms, the Danelaw embraced today’s counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Morton claimed over 90 years ago that it formed one of the most interesting and least exploited districts in the country.

Some will suggest he and fellow-journalist Clement Scott, who prised open the petals of Poppy land several years earlier, did their best (or worst) to rid Norfolk and close neighbours of innocence and isolation in readiness for a brash and seemingly insatiable tourist industry.

It depends, of course, where you stand over the old conundrum on discovering somewhere enchantingly different. Is it right to spread the word or reasonable to keep the secret to yourself?.

Writers like Scott and Morton certainly carried a fair bit of weight and painted enticing pictures, the latter pitching a claim for a cosy seat on the East Anglian Tourist Board of directors with gems such as “I do not know another part of England in which the history and romance of this country leap more readily to the mind”.

Morton’s chapter How to Enjoy Norfolk betrays more than a whiff of patronising and subservience to the sort of comments already  qualifying as cliches before the Second World War. We have been “remarkable for shrewdness, carefulness, blunt honesty and suspicion” ever since I started reading, writing and ruminating.

He noted how “Norfolk people take their time”  and their dialect was “full of words you will hear nowhere else” while Norwich was sought out by “only the most critical and intelligent tourists” and a holiday on the Broads could feature “ a wherry seeming to glide on air between star-spangled skies” on still nights in summer.

I was tempted to give him top marks for describing Cromer as “the most fashionable watering-place on the Norfolk coast” before alighting upon  tribute to “a part of Norfolk almost unknown and never mentioned in the ordinary guide book”.

He refers to about 30 miles of “meal marshes” between Sheringham and Gore Pont, deserted except for a fowler or stray naturalist. They are cut across with little creeks and rivulets and every tide sends salt water running up through the sea lavender and  samphire.

Flocks of wild birds soar over dead seaports. The sea has retreated from the land over centuries. And there, far away, outlined against the yellow sand-bar, black dots – the women of Stiffkey, great baskets on their backs and skirts pinned up above bare knees, gathering cockles.

It doesn’t take much after that to turn to a Morton missive from a previous visit and see Viking ships beaching on the distant strand – “the big, red-bearded men wading to the shore, dragging their great double-bladed swords through the purple marshes, shading their eyes to the distant land”.

And ne ’r a tourist board official among them.