The Little Ouse and the railway line run parallel between Thetford and Brandon. Weaving between them is the most northerly stretch of the St Edmund Way, an 80 mile walking route which passes through Bury St Edmunds down to Manningtree in Essex. In reverse, this is Stage 9 of Andy Bull’s London to Walsingham Camino, a newly-resurrected route from the capital to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.
This was the first linear route of my sabbatical, parking the car at Brandon and taking the train to Thetford.
There were several monastic houses and over 20 churches in Thetford on the eve of the Reformation. It must have been like a mini-Norwich. In the 1960s Pevsner declared: ‘The great days of Thetford are over.’ I fear the town has become yet more luckless since.
St Peter, Thetford is redundant. Externally it is a good example of a smaller town church. The nave and chancel have funny proportions, as though they’ve been squeezed into the site, or one is looking at a reflection in one of those comedy mirrors found at piers and funfairs. Its current use is unclear.
Further into the town centre is St Cuthbert, Thetford. This is the town’s active parish church, but not generally open during the week. With a 10 mile walk ahead of me, I didn’t have the enthusiasm to find St Mary-the-Less (also redundant, and, judging from information online, in a sorry state), nor the ‘scanty fragments’ mentioned by Pevsner of St Giles, St Laurence or St Nicholas.
The ruins of Thetford Priory, a large Cluniac monastery, are managed by English Heritage, and currently closed to the public due to repeated vandalism. On the other side of the river, the remains of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, also English Heritage, are closed for maintenance. I left Thetford, a town with a pivotal role in Norfolk church history, having not stepped foot inside any of its ecclesiastical sites.
The path alongside the Little Ouse takes you initially through attractive meadows on the outskirts of the town. The muntjacs here are tamer than they are in the countryside, like urban foxes. They are beginning to get a similar reputation. Before long I was among Thetford’s warren of post-war housing. Distracted by a church-plant in a CofE primary school, I took the wrong path, and found myself in the heart of an estate.
A kindly postman reckoned I should be able to get back to the river path by following the perimeter of the sewage plant. (I realise I am not selling Thetford.) I followed my nose. Last week’s rainfall meant some of the path was rather boggy. Squelching through mud with the odour of sewage filling your nostrils is not a pleasant experience. At last, I could see the path, but separated from me by a bank of nettles. Opting for the lesser of two evils, I trampled through the nettles. My legs are still stinging. I was rewarded by a heron taking flight and gliding over the water. And, lest doubt crept in, someone had graffitied ‘God’ and a couple of arrows under the A11.
I was already deep into Thetford Forest. This is not an ancient woodland. It was planted by the Forestry Commission in the 1920s, to build up the stock of timber after the First World War. I’ve driven through it countless times, but it is only when you walk through Thetford Forest that you can see that its pines are planted in perfectly straight lines.
The tallest tower of the walk was Thetford Power Station. Before forestation, this area was mined for flint, and the sandy path around this biomass power plant is littered with bits of stone.
Passing under the railway, I climbed up towards Blood Hill, and the site of St Helen, Santon, which overlooks the railway cutting and Suffolk countryside beyond. This is almost certainly a pre-Christian site, and remains of the church are long gone. Down a steep bank, into a pit, is St Helen’s Well, a natural spring. I had an uneasy feeling as I scrambled down the bank, as if this might be a place of sacrilege rather than sanctity. But, reaching the spring, it felt entirely peaceful. This was my first holy well since Sedgeford in Walk 2. I love springs. There is something almost miraculous about a tiny, gentle trickle of water appearing from nowhere. No wonder Pagans, long before Christians were here, were attracted to these sites.
I read part of John 4, set at a well, in which Jesus tells a woman of Samaria that he is the ‘living water’. I was materially thirsty at this point. ‘The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ And, lest this indeed be a place where darker things are celebrated, I prayed. Having sung hymns from childhood, I am blessed with the ability to recall a hymn from memory for almost any occasion. Here I sang:
I heard the voice of Jesus say,
‘Behold I freely give
The living water; thirsty one,
Stoop down and drink, and live.’
I came to Jesus, and I drank
Of that life-giving stream;
My thirst was quenched, my soul revived,
And now I live in him.
Not far away, back down the slope from the site of St Helen’s Church, is All Saints, Santon. It is sandwiched in a 400 foot gap between the river and the railway.
It had been a lonely walk since Thetford, but as I approached I heard the sound of infant exuberance. In the churchyard were two mothers, one with a toddler, the other heavily pregnant. They were playing; the little girl being photographed among the oxeye daisies, pleading with her mother that she might go back into the church. Out of the mouths…
I have a little guide to Norfolk, written by William A Dutt in 1902, which describes Santon as ‘a parish chiefly consisting of rabbit warren’. The church was rebuilt by Thomas Bancroft of Santon Hall in 1628, and a chancel added in 1858. Is this Norfolk’s smallest church? It is tiny, and was declared redundant in 1994. There are only six dwellings in what was the parish, and a population in single figures. Visitors to this peaceful spot, however, are plenteous; there’s an attractive picnic area by the river.
Crossing the river into Suffolk, I meandered my way to St Mary, Santon Downham. This is the sort of church in which one could spend hours investigating what the guide calls ‘an unusually complex architectural history, not easy to unravel’. Both north and south doorways have Norman arches. Above the south door is a large carved stone panel depicting either a lion (Pevsner), a wolf (Simon Knott), or a Paschal Lamb. I wonder if it's non-Christian imagery, which has somehow ended up here.
A north aisle or transept has gone. Not only does the line of the arcade remain, but so does a piscina, now on the church’s exterior. The rood screen has a tiny ‘window’ carved into it, measuring no more than four inches. Does its Y-tracery give us an indication of when it was made, or was its maker mimicking a window in the church?
There are three footpaths or bridleways which link this village with Brandon. I, predictably, favoured the longer route, leaving the St Edmund Way, and passing the Forestry Commission’s East England office to the Little Ouse path.
My path between reeds, rushes and (yet more) nettles was crowded with a type of dragonfly (or damselfly) I have never seen before. They were the darkest possible emerald green, and they filled the air wherever I walked. Had they not been so benign I would have called them a plague.
This was a good walk for wildlife. As I approached Brandon, I think I spotted a female kingfisher. However, it was eleven miles which were never free from the noise of human activity. At the start of the walk, as the hum of traffic from the A11 faded, it was replaced by the buzz of the power station. I was rarely more than a few hundred yards from the railway, with trains shooting past at surprisingly regular intervals. Nearer Brandon, fighter jets from nearby RAF Lakenheath roared overhead, subsequently joined by the sound of heavy industry on the northern edge of Brandon. I tried to weave this activity into my prayers, but deep down I wanted peace and quiet, and the sound only of nature.
Despite passing few people, I was conscious throughout this walk that I was treading a pilgrim path. In Santon Downham, some American pilgrims had signed the visitor book, and commented that they were on their way to Walsingham. I hope, before the sabbatical is over, to write something about the spirituality of walking. Suffice to say, I felt myself in step with those who have walked – and still walk – to the great shrines of St Edmundsbury and Walsingham either side of this county border. May my prayers join with theirs.
Walk: 11.3 miles https://explore.osmaps.com/route/22066020/thetford-to-brandon
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