St Nicholas’ Church, Blakeney (notable feature: beacon tower)
The village of Blakeney is on the North Norfolk coast. It is built around a couple of streets which slope down towards the tidal frontage of the river Glaven, which loops round the mud flats to form Blakeney Haven. Nowadays the haven is a narrow, shallow, muddy channel with a small road running parallel to it and wooden jetties which children catch crabs from, overlooked by the quietly opulent Blakeney Hotel.
The haven leads round to a flat open gravel and mud area where cars can park (unless there’s a high tide) so that visitors can stroll round the little town’s roads, climb the grassy mound which overlooks the sea, take the kids crabbing or set off for a walk along the North Norfolk Coastal Path which runs along the frontage here, heading off west towards Morston Quay or east along a grassy causeway round to the village of Cley.
So nowadays Blakeney is a small but (in the summer) bustling tourist village, but from the high Middle Ages (1400) through to the 17th century it was a thriving fishing port and it could afford to pay for the building of a massive church in the Perpendicular style dedicated to the patron saint of sailors, St Nicholas.
The Perpendicular style (1380 to 1500) was the last of the three main Gothic styles of churches in England and is easily spotted because by the 1400s architects had perfected the technique of making big windows. The fact that the 4-light windows along the ground floor of Blakeney church are wider than the wall between them instantly tells you this is a Perpendicular or ‘Perp’ church.
St Nicholas church, Blakeney (Source: Visit East of England website)
Thus it comes as no surprise to learn that although the church was founded in the 13th century, most of the structure dates from the 15th century when Blakeney was at the height of its importance as a seaport.
An unusual architectural feature is a second tower at the far end of the chancel, on the left in this photo. It was used as a beacon for ships entering the haven at dusk or night and was helped by the fact the church stands on a low bluff about 30 metres above sea level. It has many interesting features inside including a vaulted chancel with a big stepped seven-light lancet window and the hammerbeam roof of the nave. Above all it feels spacious, clean and very well maintained. It feels used and loved and some of that love rubs off on the visitor.
Saint Peter and Saint Paul church, Fakenham
Fakenham is a market town about ten miles inland from the North Norfolk coast. It sits on the River Wensum although in an hour or so wandering round I never saw the river. Fakenham has a population of about 7,500 i.e. it’s a small sleepy place. It’s surrounded by a ring road and some modern superstores, a Tescos and an Argos and their big car parks. But if you walk the short distance into the town centre you arrive at an attractive wide medieval street lined with Georgian houses, although admittedly many of them now house charity shops or takeaway food joints. And off to the north, on the highest piece of land, is the grassy graveyard and imposing parish church.
Saint Peter and Saint Paul church, Fakenham (Source: A Church Near You website)
The chancel and nave were built between 1300 and 1375 in the middle of the three Gothic styles, the Decorated style (1280 to 1380). The west tower was added between 1400 and 1450 and is 115 feet tall. Note the clerestory of windows along the main body above the ground floor aisle. One way of distinguishing Fakenham’s Decorated from Blakeney’s Perpendicular style is by looking at the windows along the aisle. The decorated ones have three lights and are still round-headed. The Perpendicular ones are that bit more sophisticated, with four lights, wider and flatter.
St Andrew’s Church, Wellingham (notable feature: painted panels)
Wellingham is a tiny hamlet 8 miles south of Fakenham. There’s no pub, no shops, just a handful of farm buildings, a manor house, some holiday cottages, hardly anything. Except this lovely unspoilt church, which doesn’t even have a wall dividing it from the single-track road, just a bluff of grass you climb up onto the grassy churchyard. St Andrew’s has a classic village church shape: a rectangular chancel then a step up to the roof of the nave, a south porch and a square two-storeyed tower with battlement, no aisles (i.e. extensions either side of the nave), no transepts (i.e. extensions north and south of the tower. Inside it feels dark and magical.
Scholars believe the nave was built by the Normans and the chancel was added in the 13th century. The earliest firm date is 1304 when its first rector is recorded. The two 2-light windows and single lancet window in the chancel probably date from the 13th century. The consistent ‘look’ of the exterior walls and tower indicate that the entire church was given a thorough restoration by the Victorians. That explains why it feels so neat and pointed and clean.
St Andrew’s church, Wellingham. Note the abundance of grass
But all these details pale into insignificance when you go inside and discover the great treasure the church contains – an early 16th century roodscreen complete with original paintings! The screen was the gift of one Robert Dorant and a half-legible inscription on the right hand pane dates it to 1532, during the reign of Henry VIII (1509 to 1547). This explains why some of the figures have distinctly Tudor clothing and hats.
Tudor painted panels in Wellingham church showing left: St George slaying the dragon, right: St Michael balancing souls and Christ rising from his tomb (source: Vitrearum’s Medieval Art)
The three panels on the left (north) side are:
- Saint Sebastian transfixed with arrows
- Saint Maurice with sword and lance
- Saint George killing a dragon: a damsel is standing at top right waiting to be rescued, a cartoon king and queen watch from the battlements of a nearby castle at top left, and a few dogs frolic around in the joyful manner of the Middle Ages.
The panels on the right (south) side are:
- St Michael with vertical golden wings weighing souls in a balance: in one pan are a pair of tiny naked Christians who are being helped into Paradise by the Blessed Virgin who is hanging her rosary on the scales; in the other pan are a couple of black little devils, with a third hanging on the edge of the pan trying to weigh it down.
- Christ depicted as the Man of Sorrows rising from a white sepulchre: he is surrounded by the images of the sacred objects associated with the Passion, namely the spear, the pliers and nails, the sponge, the crown of thorns, even the dice the soldiers used to gamble for his clothes. A scroll over his head reads Ecce Homo or ‘this is the man’, the Latin words used by Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of John, when he presents a scourged Jesus Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, to a hostile crowd shortly before his crucifixion.
- the third panel is now blank although Walter Rye, who recorded his visit in the 1870s, wrote that you could make out the martyrdom of St Thomas of Canterbury (subject of the current exhibition at the British Museum).
It’s absolutely astonishing that you or I can just walk in off a country lane, stroll right up to these priceless paintings and kiss them, touch them or admire them as we wish.
St Mary’s church, East Raynham (terrible condition)
The solid grey flint appearance of the church and the fussiness of the details all point to the fact that this is a Victorian church, rebuilt by 5th Marquis of Townshend in 1866 to 1868 by Clark and Holland of Newmarket at a cost of £5,000. The walls are flint with stone dressings and it has slated roofs except for the leaded chancel, not that you really notice, it’s all a rather sombre grey colour. Despite the date of the build it is not ‘High Victorian’ in style but an attempt to recreate the Decorated-Perpendicular detail of the church it replaced although with a kind of Disney extravagance, including as many Gothic tricks and features as they could cram in, from the buttresses and fiddly machicolations to the octagonal stairway against the tower.
St Mary’s church, East Raynham (photo by the author)
But the really striking thing about this church was the appalling dereliction and neglect of the interior. Large areas of plaster had fallen off the walls and shattered on the tiles. All the pews were laced with cobwebs and bird poo littered the carpet between the pews. I’ve rarely seen a church in such a shabby state. It was like it had been utterly abandoned and left to rot for years. It was symptomatic that there was no guide or leaflet telling the visitor anything about the church. I’m reluctant to be moralistic but I thought the condition of this church was a scandal, especially as it is only a few hundred yards from grand Raynham Hall, country seat of the Marquesses Townshend, who you would have thought have some kind of obligation to keep it in a decent state.
All Saints Church, Helhoughton
Helhoughton is a small village 4 miles west-south-west of the town of Fakenham, population in 2011 was 346. There is no pub and no shop. I know because I asked. The church is built in the curve of the small road through the village. I was doing a circular walk around the three villages which surround the grand Raynham estate, East Raynham, West Raynham and South Raynham. Helhoughton is a half mile detour to the north and so can be considered a kind of honorary Raynham.
All Saints church, Helhoughton
The nave and chancel, constructed from flint and stone with some brick dressings, combine to make it appear a very long church. The chancel dates from the 14th century and has two bays. The tower dates from the 15th century but the nave which connects them dates from the late 18th century which explains the visibility of red brick around the building (during the Tudor period builders shifted from using flint or stone to the much cheaper and flexible new material of brick, signalling the end of the great medieval period of church building).
The chancel needs those two brick buttresses you can see in this photo. When you walk round the outside you can see the south wall is bulging outwards.
Inside you are struck by the fact that the nave doesn’t have a vaulted, arched or barrel roof, like most churches, but during a restoration of the 1980s was given a completely flat white plaster ceiling with spotlights embedded in it, like in a modern bedroom or fashionable kitchen. Which creates a pleasingly incongruous effect.
But this feature aside, I found the interior was in poor shape, with broken plaster strewn across the floor, cobwebs between the pews and the ancient font green with mould. I chatted to a local lady who was outside her nearby house, gardening, and she explained that the congregation has dwindled to about 7, whereas the total estimated costs of a complete restoration to stop the church collapsing are in the order of £140,000. Where is the money going to come from to stop thousands and thousands of historic old churches like this mouldering and collapsing?
- All Saints Church, Helhoughton on the Churches of Norfolk website
St Margaret’s Church, West Raynham (ruined)
It’s tempting to say St Margaret’s was the most spiritual of all the churches I visited because it is in ruins. The church was abandoned in the 18th century when the parish was consolidated with East Raynham and left to collapse. It now consists of fragments of the west tower, nave and chancel. For the rest, it is open to the sky and the elements.
Remnants of the tower and north doorway of St Margaret’s church, West Raynham, (Source: Geograph)
These ruins stand in a small churchyard which has been allowed to go wild except for a handful of tastefully and mown paths through long summer grass. This care and taste set a tone of respect for the old ruins’ natural environment which is very calming and rather wonderful. Wild flowers push up among the long grass hiding the ancient gravestones. In what remains of the nave there is a carved wooden Madonna and in what was once the chancel, three solid, geometrical, unadorned slabs of stone make an altar which is powerful and dignified. All rather wonderful.
St Martin’s church, South Raynham (tranquil)
St Martin’s feels like a really rural church, located at the end of Church Lane and amid open fields, I arrived after walking country paths from St Margaret’s West Raynham a mile to the north. It is another ‘long’ church, with the tower at the west end then a long nave, and chancel. Compare and contrast with the shorter, more compact church at Wellingham. It is probably a rebuilding of the 14th century, embellished in the late 15th. The squareness of the windows suggests they are later, Decorated additions, cut into earlier walls. All the guides mention its ancient mensa or altar stone but to be honest I didn’t notice this. I just enjoyed the quiet beauty of the location and the air of calm sanctity of the interior.
St Martin’s church, South Raynham (source: Geograph)
All Saints church, Litcham (magnificent rood screen)
Sometimes the graveyard sets the tone for a church before you’ve properly looked at it let alone gone inside. Litcham is a charming little village built on the slope of a hill with a pub facing a tiny village green then a minor road sloping down, presumably to a small river or stream, and on the left is the churchyard buttressed by a brick wall. There’s hardly any traffic and nobody on the street. It’s feels quiet and sheltered.
All Saints church, Litcham (source: Norfolk Churches)
From the outside the most striking thing is the tower which is built in brick and your hunch that it is a later addition is confirmed by a stone plaque embedded in it with the date 1669 and the name of the donor Matthew Halcott. Inside the guide explains that Halcott was a Royalist who paid for the erection of a new tower to celebrate the Restoration of Charles II (in 1660).
Anyway all this is swept away when you walk inside to the calm, cool, shady interior, look around and see an awesome treasure, the church’s magnificent rood screen, not only the painted panels along the bottom but the slender decorated pillars supporting the extraordinarily ornate and beautifully coloured tracery within its five arches. It takes your breath away.
The painted rood screen at All Saints church, Litcham
There are two sets of four painted panels on either side of the gates which open into the chancel and themselves contain 3 painted panels, so that’s a total of 22 in all. Some are better preserved than others, and the church guide mentions St Cecilia, St Dorothy, St Agnes with her lamb, St Petronilla with her large key and book, St Helena with her cross, and St Ursula holding arrows while some of her eleven thousand virgins hide amid her skirts. All women.
Figures on the south side, to the right, include St Gregory in a papal tiara, St Edmund holding three arrows, a figure leading a dragon on a halter, St Walstan, St Hubert, St William of Norwich, and St Louis of France. All chaps.
Interesting as these are as examples of medieval iconography, the real impact is made by the entire shape, design and colouring of the screen as a whole, with the intricacy of the painted decoration echoing the fine filigree carving of the wood into the five decorated ogee arches and the complex window-style arches above them, echoing the shapes of windows, sedilia and other features of Gothic architecture. A little like Islamic religious decoration, it invites the visitor to be transported into its world of patterns and decorations, rapt away from the humdrum and everyday into a world of gorgeous shapes and colours, symbolic of the medieval heaven with its elaborate hierarchies of angels, symbolic colours, and endless joy of eternal adoration.
St Andrews Church, East Lexham (ancient round tower, modern paintings)
The village of East Lexham, 7 miles north of Swaffham, has almost entirely disappeared. The church stands in a grassy graveyard with a large modernised barn complex to the west, a wood to the east and farm buildings to the south. The church has two notable features.
The round tower is thought to be the oldest in England, built around 900, i.e. in the reign of Edward the Elder, King of the Saxons from 899 to 924. There are some 180 churches with round towers in England: 124 in Norfolk, 38 in Suffolk, 7 in Essex and 2 in Cambridgeshire, and there is, you will be please to know, a Round Towers Churches Society which needs your support.
St Andrew’s church, East Lexham (Photo by the author)
The second notable feature is that, inside the church are three very striking modern paintings by contemporary artist Richard Foster. I’ve seen many modern sculptures, tapestries, stained glass, altar covers and so on, but hardly any straight paintings. they are in a pleasingly realistic style and depict The Rising from the Dead set in a nice looking English graveyard, a tall modern fisherman representing the church’s name saint, St Andrew, and The Nativity featuring a modern-dress Mary, contemporary looking ‘shepherds’ and a very modern looking angel.
The Nativity by Richard Foster in East Lexham church (photo by the author)
St Nicholas Church, West Lexham (round tower)
Only a mile off the A1065 is the very quiet hamlet of West Lexham. As you wangle through the village’s curved road it’s easy to miss the turnoff up a steep track to the car park for this church which also serves what appears to be a professional vegetable garden with rows of polytunnels. Anyway this is another very old round tower church.
The tower itself is probably Saxon, and crudely constructed of flint and mortar with a couple of small high windows. It was recently restored which explains it whitewashed appearance. By contrast the main body of the church was almost entirely derelict by the early 19th century and was rebuilt in the early 1880s as the solid buttresses and the uniform flint walling suggest. So you have the oddity of a solid Victorian church propping up a Saxon tower.
Exterior of St Nicholas’ church, West Lexham (photo by the author)
St Mary and All Saints Church, Newton-by-Castle Acre (Saxon tower)
This church is right by the busy A1065 Mildenhall to Fakenham road, about 4 miles north of Swaffham. The car park is easily mistaken for a layby. The village of Newton-by-Castle Acre barely exists (it has a population of 37) and gets its name because it is half a mile south of the more famous village of Castle Acre, itself home to the large grassy mound at the centre of a ruined castle and the nearby ruins of a priory.
The prosperity which lifted so many communities in 14th and 15th century East Anglia passed newton by and so the church was not rebuilt in the high Gothic style and so is not very different from the Saxon church built here in the 11th century. So although the two windows in the west of the nave are Victorian restorations of 15th century enlargements, the slender lancet window at the bottom of the tower is more indicative of what the earliest English churches looked like.
In fact the tower is the most interesting and important feature. It’s almost entirely Saxon workmanship with crude flint and mason work with large irregularly carved blocks of local car-stone as the quins or corners. The windows on each of the tower’s four sides are different in design, though all small and cramped in the Saxon style.
The line sloping across the tower at roof level indicates that there was once a south transept, long since disappeared. Originally the nave and chancel roof would have been thatched. The terracotta tiling was added during extensive restoration in 1929.
Exterior of St Mary and All Saints Church, Newton-by-Castle Acre (photo by the author)
Several things are notable about the interior. One is that the nave, tower and chancel are all the same width, with the opening into the chancel the original Anglo-Saxon one, very narrow, giving a pleasantly claustrophobic, coffin-like feeling, indicative of its great age.
There are a couple of modern wooden features, a pulpit and vicar’s stall which were made in 1959. But what really got me about this church was it is another one which is in a terrible state. The entire length of the tiled floor is green with mould and algae, particularly bad in the tower floor which isn’t just damp but wet, and in the chancel large sections of plain whitewash are bubbling or have fallen off the wall onto the floor.
Interior of St Mary and All Saints Church, Newton-by-Castle Acre (photo by the author)
St Peter and St Paul Church, Swaffham (impressive hammerhead angel roof)
Swaffham is a small market town on the A1065, 12 miles east of King’s Lynn and 31 miles west of Norwich. It has a population of 7,000. It’s big parish church is set back a few yards from the main market square, in fact a narrow triangle formed by the fork of two roads, along the sides of which and in the central space there’s still a daily market.
It’s a big, impressive, well-maintained church dating from 1454, at the height of East Anglia’s prosperity. There are aisles with 3-light Perpendicular windows, and clerestories to north and south, as well as a large transept chapel on the south side, and a tall, 2-stage tower (1485 to 1510) which you can see for miles around. It is made of rugged Barnack stone, and is fabulously decorated with symbols, most notably the large wheels containing the crossed keys of St Peter and the crossed swords of St Paul, which appear around the base course.
Instead of entering through a south porch you enter directly through the west doorway which means you are immediately struck by the immense size of the interior and the high height of the wooden ceiling. It’s only after a few moments, when your eyes have adjusted that you realise just how awesome this roof is.
It is long, with 14 ‘bays’ and an awesome early 16th century double hammerbeam wooden roof. Double hammerbeam means there are two separate beam ends to each arch and each one has a carved wooden angel with outspread wings bearing a shield at the end. Not at first obvious is that the panels above each window also contain four carved wooden angels. In total the rof, symbolic of heaven above us, contains almost 200 stately guardian angels guarding our destinies and protecting us from sin. It’s an awesome sight and feeling.
Hammerhead roof of Saint Peter and Saint Paul Church, Swaffham (photo by the author)
In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ…
‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ (John 3:16)
The risen Christ at Wellingham surrounded by the impedimenta of the crucifixion, the ‘instruments of the Passion’, watched by the king, left, and a red-capped cardinal c.1532
Books & Boots 