Chchug* and stride

It's that time of year again when I begin the *church charity mug and we prepare to join what they call the annual Ride and Stride for the Norfolk Churches Trust (as walkers, needless to say). May the shell of St James, alternating with shields on the lower frieze of the church of that name in our base of Southrepps, be metaphorically pinned to our hats as we attempt our 18-or-so-mile pilgrimage of sorts. Only connect: a couple of weeks ago I was stunned by the cathedral at Le Puy, one of the starting points for the camino to Santiago de Compostela.

I appreciate that asking for donations of any sort isn't going to seem so very pertinent when more money should be sent to help the appalling refugee crisis, so wretchedly handled here in the UK, but I suppose I could rather opportunistically invoke IS's destruction of two temples in Palmyra, which we remember with such sadness, as a symbol of 'what's gone is gone forever' - and many of these churches must be repaired or crumble and 'die'. If you want to send a cheque, contact me (since I'm now very liberal, it seems, with shelling out my email) at david.nice@usa.net. You can sponsor by the church - I think we aim to see at least 14 this time - or in a lump sum.

Last Thursday we enjoyed a little ceremony at the Tower of London, courtesy of J's raising the most money of all riders and striders last September and as a result being presented with a certificate signed by Charles (I've been slightly tongue in cheek calling it his 'Prince of Wales Award'). For its sake I was happy to postpone my visit to the Lahti Sibelius Festival, catching a plane out that night for the last couple of days. The hermit-like diplomate, though his photo will be in some East Anglian paper, won't allow the appearance here of a splendid one of him on Tower Green with two Beefeaters and General Lord Richard Dannatt (Sir, Baron, you name it, he's been decorated with it), Constable of the Tower and President of the Norfolk Churches Trust, so instead we have the latter and NCT Chair Sara Foster with the certificate. Though obscured by figures and flash, that's an 18th century painting of the Tower behind them.

It was worth the excursion. General Lord Dannatt received us in the Queen's House, which of course no tourists usually get to see, lodgings for, inter alia, the young Elizabeth and Sir Thomas More, into whose wretched prison zone we were allowed to take our glasses of champagne (the television serialisation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall wasn't filmed here, but they got the light and the space right, like so much else).

Plenty of hurly-burly surrounded us. We didn't return to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula because every quarter of an hour or so a great group of guided tourists filed in, and there wasn't time to jump into a gap. Some unfortunate visitor had fallen and broken his/her wrist by the site of the block - jinxed? - hence the ambulance.

Then Jill and Cally went off to see the Crown Jewels and I returned home to pack for the flight.

This year we'll be walking in a different part of Norfolk from our usual Burnhams/Fens/western zones, since the chief organiser of our foursome has moved from King's Lynn to Lower Southrepps. Jill was hard at work singing in our enterprising friend the mezzo, composer and conductor Susie Self's Gershwin show at the Granary Theatre in charmingly old-fashioned Wells next the Sea. So we managed to combine a visit to a matinee before Jill nobly ferried us back to Southrepps for an evening concert.

Susie had marshalled three excellent singers, including a Frenchman with an uncanny resemblance to George (though you had to pardon his English. When I find the programme I'll credit all three). The pianist was composer Michael Finnissy no less, consummate in this music and weaving in a couple of rarities as well as accompanying Susie in a deft cross-cutting between Berg's 'Nacht' and snatches of Gershwin hits ('Summertime' provided a remarkable correspondence). There was also an opportunistic star turn from Susie and Michael's totally adorable border terrier Tristan (I want one, always have). Here he is afterwards trying to lick Jill's ear before howling along to his owners' tormenting songs.

I fell in love with the Southrepps area when we went up for part of its serendipitous and superlative music festival last month, commandeered by top tenor Ben Johnson (read all about it on The Arts Desk). For TAD I was lucky to get screenshots of the concerts from the nice man filming them, but here's just one of some stands for the out-of-this-world Schubert Quintet we heard on Sunday morning.

I'll save snaps of the church's few treasures for the blog entry on this year's walk - we start at Cromer and end up at Southrepps for an evening meal in the excellent pub, by which time St James's may well be closed - but as a taster of the area here are a few shots of a much shorter route we took that Sunday afternoon: only a couple of miles to the sea, viewed from above because here are cliffs (not had those on any of the previous walks).

We came out on the coast road at a very pretty coastal village called Trimingham, its church a pilgrim site because of the head of John the Baptist (hence 'San Giovanni Decollato'); more will be revealed when we go inside on Saturday.

The walks to and fro are across very secretive-feeling farmland with an abundance of oaks - I loved it all - and back at Lower Southrepps there's a well-done boardwalk around a locally-maintained common which is a perfect sanctuary for birds.

Much more to come some time after the big day. Chronicle of last year's walk is here, with links back to 2008.

Norfolk churches: Mileham to Bittering

Our beginning, middle and end on this September's annual walk in aid of the Norfolk Churches Trust, pictured above, offer different aspects of what we're walking for. St John the Baptist Mileham, up top, where we parked the car that we'd retrieve ten hours later, has extraordinary treasures - chiefly some of  Norfolk's best medieval glass - but feels a bit tatty and unloved (the village straggles along the main road, though it does have a shop). It will need extra funds sooner or later. Godwick, a vanished settlement with the church 'wholly ruynated and decaid long since' in 1602, is a warning for the future, however picturesque its solitary tower might seem in the midst of the sheep; St Peter and St Paul Bittering Parva nearly suffered a similar fate, 'left to grazing animals in the 1950s', but the vision of one Canon Dodson saw it restored and reopened as a parish church - ostensibly for five remaining houses - in 1961.

We need more like him, but in the meantime the various conservation trusts are doing grand work. Regulars will be familiar with our motives: we walk, as we did when she was alive and we stayed with her, for our friend Jill's mother Mary Dunkerton, warden of All Saints Burnham Thorpe, the 'Nelson church'. This year was characteristic of the average - about 18 miles and 13 buildings, including ruins and Methodist chapels, which takes our overall total of Norfolk churches specific to the walks up to 149.

The walk was the most pleasant of the lot so far - if that doesn't make our fourth regular, Cally, envious, for this year she couldn't join us - since the temperature was clement, the sun not too insistent and trainers made walking easier than the rather cumbersome hiking boots. The landscape threatened rather too much prairie farming, but that made all the more impressive the stretches between Horningtoft and Stanfield, then above all between Brisley and East Bilney (a valley! Large woods!) And only, it seems, on 'Ride and Stride' day could you guarantee these churches open; Simon Knott in his excellent guide to the churches of East Anglia - of which he has seen many more than I - describes this area as the 'black hole of Norfolk', and found many of the churches firmly locked with no key obtainable.

Mileham plunged us into glass on a more spectacular scale than that of a nearby favourite, West Rudham. The west window, saved from destruction by whitewashing, is the chief glory.

Its double reticulated tracery still houses much of the original glass donated by Lord Fitzalan on his marriage into the royal Lancasters in 1340. Inheriting a fortune after the battle of Crecy, he added the tower, set to the north so as not to block the great window. The colouring stresses intermediate yellow, green (especially striking at first glance) and brown. The three main-light figures are St Catherine, dedicatee John the Baptist and St Margaret.

The paler glass below is reset and from the 15th century - figures identified here being St Margaret again on the right, and St Barbara on the left. Earlier roundels have been inserted below.

There are also fine representations, similarly reset, in the east window of the south aisle, with St Agatha in the centre, a bishop to her left and St John the Evangelist to the right.

At the bottom of the outer lights, worth inspecting at eye level, are one and a bit pack horses

and a kneeling couple.

The church interior as an ensemble didn't look great in the light we had, but it includes box pews, a 15th century pulpit and font, niches in the east wall and plenty of fine memorials - many of the names, as in the churchyard, are very piquant on floor

and wall

while there's a touching little poem about the children on this memorial.

Not sure if you can see it properly so I'll quote:

These pretty babes may passe for wonders who
Ran through the world ere they could stand or goe
The shortes and the cleanest way is best
These took that to thire everlasting rest. 

Treading across fine heraldic slabs to the Barnwell family, who lived at now-demolished Mileham Hall, is a ledger to two Pepys(es). Fermor was the diarist's cousin.

I lingered too long here, and was rebuked. Caught up with the others passing a converted Methodist chapel and a be-gnomed residence along a side turning

and a dull walk across fields took us to enchanting, isolated Tittleshall, with St Mary's churchyard an oasis after the bare open agricultural land.

The 14th century tower has canopied niches with - the guide says - decorative animals carved on the footstalls, though this looks like a chap showing his bottom.

You wouldn't expect grand monuments here, but there are five in the chancel owing to the fact that the Cokes, including Thomas First Earl of Leicester who had Holkham Hall built for his art collection, came from here.

Bridget Coke, nee Paston, died 1598, has a splendid alabaster memorial

with children kneeling at the base beautifully detailed.

Equally fine is the commemoration of her husband Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice and champion of parliamentary rights, died 1634, by Nicholas Stone in black and white marble.

Sir Edward lies in realistic sleep, again finely detailed.

Robert Coke, died 1679, has no effigy; the Holkham folk have busts by Roubiliac, Corinthian grandeur and the splendid family arms with the ostrich(es) you see around the estate.

And last but not least, there's Nollekens at, I'm told, his best, depicting Jane, first wife of Thomas Coke 'of Norfolk', showing her at her death in 1805 being received by an angel on the clouds and pointing heavenwards with a cherub beneath holding a bleeding heart.

This was the second church unmanned, but this time a signer-in-ner was to be found down the fair main street at the (this time active) Methodist chapel by the bowling green.

We've often had the warmest welcome from the Methodists. Not this time, but anyhow we got our signatures and took off across more big fields to the 'lost' village of Godstone, a rare case of redoubling church walk footsteps since we'd covered it back in 2006 - though not in such good light -

and that meant we already dreaded running the gamut of the thousands of turkeys of Godwick Hall Farm. Could the Cokes, whose seat this was at the end of the 16th century, ever have imagined their place would be dominated by the insane screeching of these famously stupid birds?

Yes, the path goes right through there. So we strode purposefully with these creatures gobbling and wailing at our heels - not entirely intimidating until we saw hundreds more heading down a funnel from the farm.

Leaving the din behind, we soon hit the church we'd also reached at the end of our 2006 walk. It was open then, but knowing what we do now it wouldn't have struck as too much of a disappointment if it hadn't been. Knott was perplexed in searching for St Mary Whissonsett; the church is approached down a long drive and green set way back from the road, with two ancient yews (just to the right below) grown together livening up the scene.

.
The best that can be said about what Pevsner calls its 'over-restored' Perpendicular is that it's used and cared for. The Anglo-Saxon cross seems curiously out of place

and most of the glass is Victorian or Edwardian - this annunciation is rather good, though -

but you're rewarded with medieval fragments including Christ in Glory in the west window if you head under the bell tower.

We tucked into our annual chicken and chutney rolls on the green and pressed on to other churches of the Upper Wensum Valley, all chronicled in a neat little book from the curious, sometimes whimsical perspective of the parish's rector, poetry-inclined Rev Robin Stapleford.His entry on St Edmund's Horningtoft shows us what a second tower looked like in a sketch of 1823. But that, like the first at the west, fell down, and now the west end is prettily surmounted by a Victorian bellcote, its continental feel enhanced by the pinetrees flanking the entrance.

Harvest festival was about to be celebrated, very pertinent in this agricultural belt as witnessed by the wreath on the west door

and: the giant beets in front of the rood screen, painted in 19th century folk-style like most of the woodwork in the church (another reason for the feeling that this was a central European rather than an English church)

Apart from the attractive ensemble, the lightness of the interior, the main treasure is the finest font in the area. Pevsner: 'of  Suffolk type, ie octagonal and with four lions against the stem and four angels with shields and four lions against the bowl'.

Our next stretch of walking was the most pleasant we'd yet encountered, with the variety of green lanes, woods and an especially lovely lime avenue

as well as what I think are the ubiquitous and tree-destroying honey mushrooms doing no harm now on a couple of stumps.

Just past a free-range pig farm we came to the handsome ensemble of St Margaret's Church and neatly rowed graveyard, Stanfield, with no sign of a settlement around it.

The approach to the south porch was the greenest and most striking of all, adding further to the sense of seclusion

with further lichened and mossy headstones lined up against the wall.

The interior feels loved and all of an Early English piece (in fact the east window dates from 1864, but Pevsner grants that it's 'convincing'. The font cover is Jacobean.

There are animal carvings on the elbow-rests of most of the thick-timbered benches. The leaflet says they're all dogs, but this looks like a hare

and this, the most characterful, a lion.

A wall-painting was recently uncovered by the Jacobean pulpit

and the triple-lancet windows were made attractively taller in the Perpendicular period.

There are fragments of old glass at the tops of several to enhance the already attractive effect

and outside are unusually placed stone heads at either end

several of which appear to be swimming, or it may just be the contorted effect of the way they seem to support - well, what I'm not sure, but the decorations are each individual and striking. 

The remoteness was only from our approach; a main road runs just beyond a clump of trees, though that meant a decent coffee stop before the great Perpendicular tower of St Bartholomew's Brisley, shining in the late afternoon sun, beckoned us onwards.

Though the road curves through the village, it's attractive, even if - again - the church, unattended, didn't seem especially well cared for. But then the walls are pleasantly rough and medieval St Christophers carrying Christ Childs have been revealed on north and south walls. The south one is fine for its silhouette

and the north for the painted detail of St Christopher's head.

The tall, wide chancel has a rather striking Victorian window of the crucifixion, garish but interestingly coloured.

Leaving the church on the north side gave another perspective

and then we were in a position where we not only looked back on the distant, tree-fringed tower

but forward (a picture wouldn't do it justice) to two more ahead of us, East Bilney in the foreground and Old Beetley further on - a Norfolk perspective we've had on several other walks. Approaching St Mary's East Bilney hinted at a change of landscape

and it sits, remote and beautifully sited, above - wonder of wonders in Norfolk, a sheer drop to the Blackwater Valley. The wall in front of which we sat for afternoon refreshment only hints at it.

St Mary's framework is essentially Early English, but it was mostly rebuilt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Another Victorian window of colourings similar to those in Bilney, this one by Shrigley and Hunt, commemorates the local celebrity. Thomas Bilney was born here in 1495. A pioneer of the Reformation, he was tried for heresy before Cardinal Wolsey in 1527, eventually released from prison, rearrested and burned at the stake in Norwich (hence the cathedral in the background).

Evening was advancing and we didn't find Bilney's cottage in the village, heading instead down the valley, a truly beautiful and untypical stretch, and up again to St Mary Magdalene Beetley.

Past 5pm, the church was shut, so we missed another fine font but not, it seemed, too much else, wandered round the shady churchyard and pressed on for a final stretch via a green lane

with views back on church tower and a tractor in a field pursued by hundreds of gulls (not visible here)

and a pheasant in surprisingly elegant death

until a couple in a car stopped and asked us if we were heading for Bittering Parva's church. They'd just locked up - first surprise, Jill had thought it was a ruin - and could follow us down the road just to let us see it. So we approached what did indeed look like a crumbling building in a wilderness from a distance (the village, of course, has gone) but turned out to be another of those resources treasured by the local community. And how good it was to talk to human beings at last who had a stake in their church's future.

I've told the story of Canon Dodson's late 1950s rescue mission up top, and the locals still continue his work with a Friends of Bittering Parva Church membership (£10 a year) going towards the upkeep. The tiny interior - this is the smallest church in Norfolk - shows their dedication.

While the bell tower is 17th century, the rest is Early English and, despite a fine piscina,

feels so more on the outside, with further carved heads around the windows.

And so, with the setting sun, back towards Raynham, sculptural harvest bales looking good in the evening light.

and a meal back in King's Lynn starting with fresh Cromer crab. This is the last time we started out from that wonderful town: next September, a different part of Norfolk beckons from Jill's new home. Any last contributions welcome - I can but ask - in a cheque made payable to the Norfolk Churches Trust and sent to me (details available on request). I'll be back with the figures of a very good year's chchugging (church charity mugging) soon.

Previous chronicles:

Beechamwell to Gooderstone, 2013
Ingoldisthorpe to Thornham, 2012
East Rudham to Helhoughton, 2011
Wormegay to Castle Acre, 2010
Walpoles to Wiggenhalls, 2009
King's Lynn to Sandringham, 2008

Earlier walks back to 2002 BB (Before Blog)