Norfolk Churches Walk preludial

Having reached our 233rd Norfolk church (mostly pre-Reformation, though we've always thrown in a few Methodist chapels) a year ago, we're off on another walk for the Norfolk Churches Trust this weekend. Plans in brief are to rove the Wensum Valley and collect specimens in Elsing, Lyng, Great Witchingham, Little Witchingham (the semi-ruined one with the medieval wall paintings), Swannington, Alderford, Attlebridge, Morton-on-the-Hill and Weston Longville. 

While I have your attention, you can donate via the Norfolk Churches Trust Just Giving website (please say that it is for David & friends). Otherwise, cheques made payable to the Norfolk Churches Trust can be posted to me at home (if you don't have the address, message me privately with an email and I'll send the address). Alternatively, a kind word never goes amiss.

This time we won't be taking in the wonderful Norfolk coastline, as we did on perhaps the most varied walk of all in 2017. We revisited Happisburgh two weekends ago, as these photos attest, more by happenstance since the crab and lobster shack at Overstrand had sold out, and so had the van at Mundesley; the girl blamed Brexit for the lack of foreigners in the trade. Our host Jill drove us southwards, and at Happisburgh to our surprise we found a shop selling what we wanted. So it was down on to the beach, just as the grey skies cleared. for a picnic under the cliffs (but not too close). Rough seas forbade swimming, but walking along the shore brought the usual frissons this quite dramatic part of the coast produces.

Thought we'd also return to the beautifully restored long barn at Waxham, hoping that this time we could get in as back in 2017 there had been a wedding reception. Same in 2021, but of course we stopped for tea. Waxham is a lonely little place behind the dunes which must be very atmospheric in the bleak midwinter. It has a somewhat schizoid existence because of the rather dilapidated farm and church on the one side and the popular tea-place which helps keep the barn in good nick

while the west end looks almost church-like with its lancet windows.

The melancholy pleasure of semi-ruins begins as you walk around what remains of Waxham Hall, a rather dilipidated farm from which the church tower can be seen from the west.

The walls of the old hall are splendid, with what Pevsner calls 'polygonal angle buttress shafts crowned by finials'

and a 15th century gatehouse, seen here from one of the church windows.

St John's feels very lonely on the seaward side

though its treasures are disproportionate to the care (not) lavished on it, starting with the traceried spandrels above the south porch entrance,

the now-mossy/mildewy Perpendicular font with quatrefoils

and the early Elizabethan, effigyless monument to Thomas Wodehouse

which contrasts pleasingly with the restraint and plainness of the church as a whole - I like these unvarnished buildings.

A splendid ruin ('one of the best...in the country,' writes Pevsner) contrasts with a rather lugubrious Victorian church in the grounds of St John the Evangelist Stanmore, which we reached at the end of last Sunday's walk in intense sunshine, led by our friend Jimmy. The old building was consecrated by Bishop Laud in 1632, and its first feature of interest is the red brick.

The interior has been closed since Lockdown, but you can see enough through various gratings. It's dominated by the 1866 Gothic Mausoleum to the Hollond Family of Stanmore Hall - clearly the Victorians were still using the old church as an extra cemetery.

The most striking monument in the graveyard proper foregrounds a perspective on the old church

and turns out to be the grave of W. S. Gilbert and his wife Lucy. Famously, Gilbert died of a heart attack while trying to rescue a young woman whom he was giving a swimming lesson in the lake at his country estate of Grim's Dyke. Handel, incidentally, has associations with Canons and St Lawrence Church a few miles away, owing to the connection with Lord Chandos. We must make another visit to see that splendidly decorated church.

Inside the Victorian edifice, there are several old monuments, best known being that of John Burnell (died 1605) and family, twice restored.

Then, rather unexpectedly in a side chapel, is the marble figure of Sir John Wolstoneholme (died 1639) by Nicholas Stone.

The much more recent glass provides some comedy specials in two saints - the first a Marvel comic hero, the second a simperer who doesn't look capable of slaying dragons.

There are, however, two sets of glass which prove noteworthy, though neither is mentioned in Pevsner. First, Burne-Jones angels in an appropriate frame

then, on the other (north) side, peacock wings on angel and lion.

We'll be seeing older glass than this in Norfolk, but the design and execution are surely both first-rate.

A century apart

Dublin, of course, is by no means exclusively Georgian - in fact the campanile in Trinity College's forecourt, above top, is mid-19th century - just as Victoriana may not be Birmingham's sole claim to fame (the former Midland Bank on Bennett's Hill is early Victorian, designed by Rickman in 1840). Seeing the two cities a day apart, Dublin for the first time, did incline me to compare incomparables.

Maybe it was because I only had one sunny hour at liberty in Birmingham before rushing off to give another last-minute pre-performance talk for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra that I relished it all the more, and didn't experience any deflating sense of provincialism as we did at the start of two days in Dublin as our raffle-won weekend break. The CBSO concert, by the way, was very fine: Vedernikov of the Bolshoy knows how to pace and maneouvre his way through Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony, though the inner pain didn't always come through, and best of all was the phenomenal and seemingly effortless Steven Osborne, razor-sharp alongside the orchestra in a revelatory Shostakovich Second Piano Concerto: no fatuous showcase, no sentimentality in the slow-movement melody, full of surprisingly scary things and the kind of thunderous orchestral pianism Stephen with a ph, Mr. Hough, simply can't muster. I took this photo from Steven with a v's website, so I hope the link suffices.


Anyway, Dublin does have Georgian splendours in the south of the city, but so bigged-up are they that we couldn't help feeling disappointed after Edinburgh, Bath or - that major serendipitous discovery last summer - Bristol. The main problem is the lack of uniformity in the jumbled colours of brick and stone. Best, perhaps, are the peaceful squares, though the big city gardens are also Victorian - St Stephen's Green and my favourite just to the south, the Iveagh Gardens laid out by Ninian Niven in 1865, by virtue of its total peace and quiet. Above this monumental pile of rocks a freaky feathered friend sang beyond the loudest, wildest variations of any known blackbird.


On the way to meet the splendid Puffin Moynihan for a drink at the Shelbourne Hotel - a meeting which led to much the best chunk of our weekend - we also found ourselves enticed into the church founded by Cardinal Newman for the catholic university, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. An intriguing Italian-style excrescence added shortly after the church's founding in 1856 sits alongside Georgian university houses.


It's no more an anomaly, I suppose, than the Burne-Jones windows which are the real selling point of Birmingham Cathedral, built in 1715 (this west window of the last judgment was added in 1895).


I guess I had a better time in Birmingham's resplendent Old Joint Stock Pub, full of locals late on a Thursday afternoon



than we did in what should have been a comparable gem in Dublin, Bewley's Tea House (we had to go to honour beloved Dame Beulah and Thomas). The building and its various salons still have their innate charm, but the ladies who owned it sold it to a chain and once-proud Bewley's now serves up lumpy scones with ersatz jam and cream. We had to tell the nice Polish girl who served us - Eastern Europeans stock the service industry here, because the Irish are generally too grand these days to condescend*, but that means the legendary native welcome isn't easy to find - that it was simply horrible, since she asked.

One black mark. One more for the pretentious hotel they'd put us up in, a vast affair ill-advisedly decked out in Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen swags and dusty, purple covered high chairs. And another for the biggest tourist rip-off going, nine euros each to see two pages of the Book of Kells at the end of an OK orientation guide. Beautiful Celtic illumination indeed, but the page I really wanted to see wasn't on display:


Fourth black mark for a substandard Italian meal, which did at least allow us to sit out on a terrace under braziers, and horrid though the hotel was, we got an undisturbed night's sleep albeit in a stuffy room with the window shut. The next morning, after a noisy hotel breakfast shared with screeching hen party women from Manchester, we headed straight for the National Gallery of Ireland, and found fault with that too. What a huge collection, with some real treasures - three marvellous Guercinos courtesy of Sir Dennis Mahon, a wall of superb Goyas, some fine Dutch interiors with a Vermeer very much as the centrepiece - but how higgledy-piggledy and badly lit. Jack Yeats is an artist I'll be dodging in future, though I loved Orpen's portrait of Count ('Cunta' in Gaelic) John McCormack.


We could easily have passed a museum-packed time had we hung around in Dublin the full weekend, but a much more enticing prospect was in store - a trip to stay with Puffin in the courtyard cottage of Huntington Castle, Clonegal, meeting into the bargain its exotic flora and fauna. Next instalment follows in due course.

*and the young 'uns who do serve can be very impertinent. As I couldn't get an answer at Trinity about the two gigantic trees in Library Square, I asked in the Tourist Information Office. The two girls giggled and said 'are you having a laugh?' I wasn't, and I've since found the information I wanted online, thank you very much.