106. What the wool merchants left behind

If you’re spending a week pottering around the quiet Norfolk countryside, you can’t help but notice the churches. There are so many of them and and the country is so flat that you see them a long way off, especially as many are some distance from their villages, in the middle of fields. And so many of them are so big, and the villages are usually so small. The tiny hamlet of Worstead (whence worsted wool) has about seven houses clustered around its enormous church. In the 1370s the Weavers’ Guild decided they were much too rich and important for the little church that had been serving the village (then much bigger and richer) for the past few hundred years, so they tore it down and built the enormous church of St Mary instead.

Then there was St Michael, Irstead (with 13th century font), St Lawrence, Ingworth (very old sermon-timer hourglass suspended by the pulpit) and St Benet’s, Horning (round tower and mysterious ancient effigy above the porch), all of them with lovely Broadland thatches…

Then today we went to Ranworth, purely because we left rather late for our walk and it was close and lay promisingly between two of the Broads. We had a very nice stroll, then, as an afterthought, thought we’d stop at the church (St Helen’s) on our way back. Even after a week of exploring extraordinarily beautiful and ancient buildings, I wasn’t prepared for this: another gloriously outsized building in a village that basically consists of a pub, a wildlife centre and a few houses; a 15th century lecturn, with antiphonal fragment (Gloria) somehow pasted on; 500-page illuminated Antiphoner, made by monks at the nearby Langley Abbey and used here before the Reformation, and what is apparently the finest painted rood screen in the country (also 15th century). And in the 19th century the church was in such a bad of repair that parishioners had to attend with their umbrellas. I’ve rarely been so moved by something so beautiful and so unexpected.

Also, to get to Ranworth we drove past a little wood called Hilly Holey, which is quite possibly the best place name ever invented.

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