There was not a cloud in the sky – not words I have often muttered in the last eleven weeks – as I set off for the final pilgrimage walk of my sabbatical on Tuesday morning.
The view across the Bure from Lammas churchyard
Radio Norfolk has been a welcome companion on these morning drives, and today the little village where I have been based was in the news. David Neill was celebrating his fortieth anniversary of being Hindringham’s postman, and, for the first time in those forty years, had been allowed to take over the manager’s office so he could be interviewed by Chris Goreham.
I think Aylsham must be Norfolk’s best town. It hasn’t fallen on hard times like some of its counterparts, perhaps because of its proximity to Norwich. Nor has it become overly gentrified, which means it’s preserved its authentic charm and loveliness.
Aylsham Church
In the corner of the marketplace, St Michael, Aylsham spreads itself across its churchyard. I was starting this walk earlier than usual – I had a train to catch – and was surprised to find it already open. Half a dozen people were praying Morning Prayer with the Rector.
I’ve visited this church twice in the last few years. A large funeral had just taken place last time I was here, and it felt like all of Aylsham was catching up afterwards. The time before that the church was abuzz with foodbank volunteers sorting donations. Today it was a joy to find it peaceful and still, and to know that all this activity was earthed in a commitment to daily prayer. This is the church being the church.
I walked through the town to the railway station. The Bure Valley Railway is a 15-inch gauge railway, which resurrected this 18 mile stretch of line in 1990, and was going to provide my return journey today. Men in boiler suits were shifting coal and stoking fires; a throwback in miniature to the great days of steam.
An old boy was sat outside his sheltered accommodation by the station, offering a little parallel with the previous day’s walk. We exchanged greetings and a comment on the weather. ‘Mind how you go,’ he said as I headed towards the footpath. I think people outside Norfolk say ‘Mind how you go’, but there’s a particularly Norfolk way of saying it. With postmen on the mind, I recalled Norfolk’s famous Singing Postman, whose ‘Mind how you go’ described an ill-fated expedition to London. I received this ‘Mind how you go’ as a benediction for my walk, reflecting on how I would miss the county’s gentle, unhurried culture.
Where a full gauge track had once been there is now space for a footpath alongside the entire length of the Bure Valley Railway. I followed this path out of Aylsham for couple of miles. Turning off from it, I traversed the final section of the River Mermaid to where it meets the Bure. Approaching St Mary the Virgin, Burgh-next-Aylsham from the south, the church appears to be entirely enveloped in lush countryside, with not another building in sight. The footbridge over the Bure leans dramatically to one side, with a sign instructing a maximum of two people on the bridge at once. By this time, I’d fallen in step with a dog-walker, the first of several people today to enthuse about my project at its final stages.
The chancel, Burgh-next-Aylsham
I’ve been wanting to visit this church for a while. Externally and internally the tower and nave could be anywhere in the county, although with a good seven sacrament font. But the delight is the exquisite Early English chancel. Sir Gilbert Scott wrote that it ‘is really one of the very best pieces of Early English one often meets with’, drawing a parallel with Lincoln Cathedral, and commenting that Burgh ‘simple as it is… has just the same merits in humbler form.’
On Sunday morning, I met a former Dean of Lincoln, who pitched up at Hindringham Church. It felt like an extraordinary coincidence that, in a county of Perpendicular, I had visited West Walton and now Burgh-next-Aylsham, both with palpable links to this, one of England’s finest cathedrals, within 48 hours.
Brampton Church
Crossing back over the footbridge, I walked the 700 yards to the Norman round tower of St Peter, Brampton. This was surely the shortest distance I had walked between two country churches not in the same churchyard.
From Brampton a footpath crosses a meadow where cows graze, towards a more established footpath alongside the Bure. Head buried in my map, I had no idea I was stomping my way into a bog. My first knowledge of it was when my left leg sunk into sludge as far as my shin. Boot and sock were entirely submerged. Thankfully my next step was on slightly firmer ground, and I hauled my left leg out. I had entirely failed to notice a strategically-placed scaffold board to my left. My leg and both boots were caked in a dark slurry of thick mud mixed with cow manure.
Up at the Bure footpath was a group of nine or ten women, walking in twos and threes, taking a morning ramble. As the first of them approached me, I confessed my mishap. They were doing a little circuit around Burgh and Brampton, and I explained that I was embarking on the thirty-third of thirty-three walks around Norfolk’s chuches. By now, the others had caught up, and I found myself with a little audience, fielding questions. ‘Where’s your parish in London?’ ‘Are you recording your walks online?’ ‘Have you been to Edingthorpe?’
The more pressing concern was the mess I was in. I peered into the Bure, wondering if I could clean myself up in it. The women were awfully sweet. One, almost like St Veronica, proffered a cloth. Already conscious of the odour emanating from my leg, I couldn’t possibly accept. Another, who clearly knows the area well, suggested a small beach further along the river where the edge of the river bed is firm enough to stand in. So off I went in search of it.
It was already hot, and my paddle in the Bure was a welcome one. Less so was the process of trying to clean my boots and wash my socks. Feet dry and reclothed, it was time to continue. As I approached a stile by the road, a young woman nimbly jumped onto the wall and sat down. Because most of my walks have been on weekdays, the vast majority of the people I have stopped to talk to have been pensioners. It made a nice change to have a conversation with someone younger than me.
She had just dropped her car off at the garage, and decided to spend an hour in the sun by the Bure, doing her diary. What a beautiful place to wait for an MOT! Here was someone who clearly loves living in Norfolk, and counts her blessings. She hoped that the ‘good vibes’ of the weather were a propitious sign for the car passing its MOT. ‘If not, at least you have an excuse to stay here while they fix it,' I joked, 'but it might be an expensive sunbathe.’
Oxnead Church
St Michael, Oxnead is not much further from Brampton than Brampton is from Burgh. This is ostensibly an estate church, next to Oxnead Hall. It has a tiny little sixteenth century tower. Oxnead Hall is now a very plush wedding venue, and, judging from the positioning of some of the furniture, this church gets some business out of it. The Hall was home to the Pastons in the sixteenth century, and Oxnead’s chancel contains a number of monuments. These are not as lavish as those at Paston or Tittleshall, but it was nice to feel I was completing the set.
This was a walk which necessitated two OS maps, and Oxnead is where the maps meet. I swapped them round in the porch. Walking through the fields from Oxnead to Buxton felt like crossing an imaginary boundary between North Norfolk and the Broads. Norfolk is a county of many parts and landscapes, and I’ve often noted how very quickly you can move from one to another.
Buxton
St Andrew, Buxton is in the centre of its village. With a school next door and a nursery opposite, my visit was accompanied by the joyous sound of children enjoying a summer’s day. The church feels lively too, although I wasn’t so sure about the life-size image of Greta Thurnberg, holding a ‘Save our planet’ placard, in the south aisle.
As I was about to leave, two retired clergy arrived to set up for the midweek Communion and lunch. Having commented in previous posts about the absence of clergy in Norfolk, I’d now seen three priests in one morning. I was warmly invited to stay, an invitation which I would have accepted with alacrity had I not timed this walk in order to catch the last train back from Wroxham.
Interior, Lammas Church
My only regret about this walk was that very little of the route was actually alongside the Bure. Doing it again, I would be tempted to follow the river as it loops from Oxnead to Lammas, and then return along the other side of the water to get to St Andrew, Lammas. This church is attractive, with, I think, the most pronounced weeping chancel I have seen so far. (An explanation at the back of church describes it, in Norfolk-speak, as ‘being a bit on the huh’.)
What’s really special here is the situation. The church is reached by a narrow track from the road, and sits very literally on the banks of the Bure. A herd of cattle was being moved into the meadow on the other side of the river as I sat in the churchyard. I revelled in the beauty of God's creation.
Lammas Church
Following a lane out of Lammas, I (almost literally) bumped into a lady delivery parish magazines. Delivering mail really had become a theme for the day. This parish is part of the Aylsham District Team Ministry, and there’s a vacancy here. ‘Oh, do come and be our priest!’ We chatted about church life in Norfolk. She articulated a real worry about the challenge of small, ageing communities keeping pace with the maintenance of church buildings. I’ve encountered this a lot over the months I’ve been here. I assured her that the five churches of the Aylsham District that I had visited this morning were among the best-kept I had seen.
I have really enjoyed the ways in which these conversations have informed my prayers as I’ve walked through the Norfolk countryside. Looking back, the walks like today’s, when I have met people along the way, have been the richest. These people are the living stones of the church, and have been, unexpectedly perhaps, just as an important part of my pilgrimage as the church buildings.
From here, I rejoined the railway line at Little Hautbois Hall as far as Great Hautbois. The origin of these placenames has nothing to do with oboes, and, anyway, they are pronounced ‘Hobbis’. Just beyond Church Farm is a track leading to the ruined church of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Great Hautbois. The Revd Richard Woodham, a retired priest in nearby Coltishall, had encouraged me to visit. ‘I find it is a liminal place,’ he had written. He’s not wrong.
Ruins at Great Hautbois
It is a ruin which is well-preserved. All the walls are intact, and both the slender round tower and the chancel have roofs. This church is better known as St Theobald’s – indeed, that is how it appears on the map – as there was a shrine to this French hermit in the middle ages. I'm not sure how his cult developed in this patch of rural Norfolk, but it is a fittingly solitary place, like so many I have visited. I knelt at the site of the shrine, praying that the solitude I have embraced for much of my walking may be fruitful as I prepare to re-enter the busyness of parish life next week. Retracing old pilgrim routes and discovering almost-forgotten shrines, has been another joy of my sabbatical.
Its replacement is Holy Trinity, Great Hautbois, just a quarter of a mile along the road, built by a wealthy, Victorian clergyman. In truth, the new location was no more strategic than the old one. It’s nearer Colitshall than Great Hautbois. The rectory is now the main building of a massive Girl Guilding centre, and the churchyard is locked and the church looks largely abandoned. I wonder if there is a lesson here for the contemporary Church of England, and especially dioceses like Norwich, as we contemplate the future of church buildings. Here in Great Hautbois it’s the church which has been deroofed and allowed to become a ruin which is the one the pilgrim can visit and discover something of the presence of God. The redundant church may have its roof, but it serves, as far as I can see, no purpose at all. If anything, it portrays a negative image of the God to whose glory it was built.
Coltishall Church
On then to St John the Baptist, Coltishall, with its little Saxon windows high up on the north wall. This is a large village, popular with boaters and tourists. Sunbathers were enjoying the heat of the afternoon by the river. After what has been a very slow start to summer, it was now very much bikinis on the Broads.
As much as a lie-down was tempting, I had a special church to visit before catching my train from Wroxham. Before arriving there, I got talking a lady weeding her garden. She had been recently widowed, and still clearly in the clutches of grief. For the umpteenth time during this project I was reminded of the importance of a ministry of presence; a ministry which the demands of parish life often, perversely, crowd out.
The final church of my final walk was the first church which kindled in John Betjeman a love of churches. The film I have oft-quoted on this blog begins with Betjeman, rowing on the Bure. ‘I think it was the outline of that church tower of Belaugh against the sky which gave me a passion of churches, so that every church I’ve passed since I’ve wanted to stop and look in.’
Belaugh Church
Inside St Peter, Belaugh there is a short account, written by the churchwarden at the time, of Betjeman’s visit in 1974.
'Mr Carling, the elderly resident Rector, had an ancient dinghy, which John borrowed so that he could view the building from the river. The craft was not watertight, and when the poet ‘caught a crab’ he slipped off the thwart getting his trousers wet. Mrs Carling did her best to dry them by her coal-burning Eagle kitchen range.'
I have no idea what ‘caught a crab’ is a euphemism for, but it’s an excellent anecdote, and very Betjeman. What on earth did he do while his trousers were being dried?
The most notable thing inside the church is the rood screen, its figures much battered and defaced. The details which relate to things nautical, so close to the river, are particularly charming. Simon holds some of the surplus fish from the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Jude carries a fishing vessel.
An information board on the lectern quotes a ‘zealous Puritan’, writing to a sheriff in Norwich during the Commonwealth: ‘The screen hath the Twelve Apostles, their faces rubbed out by a godly trooper from Hobbies… The steeple house stands high, perked like one of the idolatrous high places of Israel.’ Today, there is an ecumenical covenant between the churches in and around Wroxham, a signed copy of which is on the notice board. Thank God for progress.
Whereas Lammas’ church is almost level with the river, Belaugh towers a good fifty feet over it, up a steep bank. It’s an impressive sight as you approach on the footpath from Coltishall, but I would love to see it from the river itself. The church, like Horning, has its own mooring, with a ‘Pilgrims’ Path’ up to the church, and a display in the church explains how this came to be.
Belaugh Church's mooring
When the old Rectory was sold, presumably in the late 70s, the saintly (and Norfolk-born) Aubrey Aitken, Bishop of Lynn, together with the churchwardens at the time, lobbied for a piece of land to be retained so that there was access to the church from the river. The Bishop, recollecting this years later, wrote:
There were horrified moans and groans at this suggestion. It would devalue the rectory. It would require some piling to the bank to make the mooring safe and attractive to visitors. It would cost money! Landlubbers in the Church Commissioners’ office in Westminster had to be convinced of the importance of this scheme to the local church. A diocesan committee in Norwich had to be persuaded to visit the site itself. For once, however, good sense prevailed and, not without a little pressure, the land was excluded from the sale, and the Commissioners even came up with a useful grant towards the cost of making a good mooring.
You can see why Aubrey Aitken was such a popular figure. Although I had already climbed up the lane on the other side of the churchyard, I made my way down to the mooring, so I could ascend the Pilgrims’ Path. Bishop Aubrey wrote that he processed up here in cope and mitre, having sung ‘For all the saints’ raucously on the river on his way from Wroxham on a wherry. I’m not sure he’d manage it now. The steep path is, in places, falling away from its supports, and some maintenance is required if the Commissioners’ investment is going to continue to yield spiritual results. Indeed, I observed a marked difference between the churches of the Aylsham District Team Ministry and the churches of the other two benefices I visited today. The former were all well-kept; the latter less so. Why are resources thinner nearer Wroxham? These villages don’t seem any less wealthy? Is there an argument here for larger team ministries centred on towns, mirroring the ‘minster model’ which was so fashionable ten or twenty years ago?
Detail of St Paul on the screen at Belaugh
I lingered here, and I was glad I did. It felt as though many strands of the past twelve weeks were coming together. The image of St Paul on the rood screen includes a finely painted sword, reminiscent of the images in my own parish church, dedicated in his honour, to which I will return on Monday. On the Rector’s stall was the prayer card given out by Bishop Peter Nott when he made his pilgrimage around his diocese for its 900th celebrations in 1995/1996. Amazed that it was still here after nearly 30 years, I took it as a sign that I should pray its prayer:
O Lord God,
from whom we come,
in whom we are enfolded,
to whom we shall return:
Bless us in our pilgrimage through life;
with the power of the Father protecting,
with the love of Jesus indwelling,
and the light of the Spirit guiding,
until we come to our ending
in life and love eternal.
Amen.
None of today’s churches was especially spectacular, but between them they had everything one would associate with Norfolk churches: rood screens, clerestories, weeping chancels, round towers, and ruins. And in each of them I found a deep peace, no doubt enhanced by their coolness on a sultry day.
As I walked through the fields to rejoin the railway line, I was deeply thankful for the blessings of these pilgrimages across Norfolk. The chief purpose of a sabbatical, as the name suggests, is rest. ‘Come to me,’ says Jesus, ‘all you who labour and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’ After fifteen years of ordained ministry, and six years in my current parish, which have included the vicissitudes of the pandemic, I feel as though I have come to Jesus, to find rest, in the landscape and churches of this very special part of the world.
This was the last walk, but not quite the last churches. There are a couple of visits lined up for the weekend, and I hope to write some reflections over the coming weeks and months as a way of allowing the sabbatical to continue to bear fruit. And, of course, I’ll be returning to Norfolk, and hope to add to this compendium of pilgrimages over the years ahead. (If you haven’t already, you can subscribe by adding your email address in the box below, and you’ll get a message whenever I post something.)
This was one of only two linear walks, and I’d left it to last so I could finish with a treat: a ride back to Aylsham by steam train. After almost 14 miles in baking heat, and still stinking of cow poo, I think I deserved it.
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