Ashwicken sits by the road between Kings Lynn and Gayton. There are a few houses on the road itself, and more in a long straggling curve to the south, but the parish was once more populous. The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon aesc-wic, and a wic was a place of some significance, perhaps a trading or manufacturing settlement, lifting it above the usual run-of-the-mill Saxon manors. Norwich, Ipswich and Harwich spring to mind. But this part of Norfolk was largely depopulated by sheep farming in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Neighbouring Leziate is now just a few houses, and Mintlyn and Bawsey hardly exist at all. Ashwicken church now serves all three former parishes.The prefix aesc became ash, and refers to ash trees, so perhaps their presence was a memorable way of referencing the settlement to strangers.

But it was the horse chestnut which I had in mind on returning here almost twenty years after my previous visit. That was back in early October 2005, and a bumper crop of conkers littered the ground at the entrance to the churchyard. The leaves had already turned, drying to tobacco-like husks, and in some places this had been happening since late July, an early sign then of the now all too familiar leaf blotch disease that affects pretty much all horse chestnuts. Here at Ashwicken, the mighty tree at the church gates seemed to have escaped the blight, and was as majestic as ever. On the ground beneath it there were hundreds of conkers. It was clear that very few children had been here to fill their pockets, and understandably so, because this is one of those remote churches you find often in Norfolk, some quarter of a mile from the nearest proper road and approached up a dirt track.

This is a church that seems larger from the outside than it does from within, not least because of the substantial buttressing and the remarkably large Perpendicular windows in the nave. The tower buttresses are particularly substantial, but at some point the parishioners seem to have given up trying to support the tower and reduced the height of it. You enter through the south porch into what is to all intents and purposes a 19th Century church, but simple and entirely rustic. The exception is an extraordinary wedding cake of a font, dripping in pendant tracery and carved from sparkly marble. It was made in Benares, India in the 1870s, specifically for this church as a memorial to a dead child.

There's a small amount of glass by Ward & Hughes, including St Peter, the Blessed Virgin, and Lois with her grandson Timothy, the last of which was perhaps a better known story then than today. The chancel was a little dark on this day in spring 2023, but looking back into the nave the west window was glorious, the late afternoon light flooding through panels depicting wild flowers. I stood for a while and then went back outside to the churchyard where their larger cousins the threshing giants towered, still leafless in April but now awaiting their inevitable rebirth.

Simon Knott, April 2023

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