St Mary, Barney

The village of Barney straggles along a back lane just to the south of the busy Fakenham to Holt road, and once must have been a popular stopping off point for pilgrims to Walsingham, which lies just a few miles over the horizon. Its parish church is in the village, but it is set back from the road behind houses so that your first proper view of it is as you enter the churchyard. As you might expect from this part of Norfolk it is not a large church, but it seems imposing on its slight rise. Pevsner described the building as over-restored, which seems harsh and you can't help wondering if he might have got his notes mixed up with those for neighbouring Swanton Novers. The 12th Century church, from which the south doorway survives, seems to have been rebuilt over the course of the late 13th and early 14th Centuries, and then at the end of the medieval period came the transept which Pevsner tells us was described as new in 1496. Perhaps surprisingly for East Anglia, where elaboration of the church itself was usually considered more urgent, the tower was also rebuilt, for which there were several bequests in the early 16th Century.

You enter the church through the south porch, where the door handle still bears the trade name of its 19th Century manufacturer, and you step into a long, aisleless interior of great simplicity and seemliness. The walls are white and the clear glass fills the church with gentle light. The slender, elegant font is presumably contemporary with the rebuilding of the tower. Above the nave the roof is a late medieval delight, silvery with age and with bosses depicting angels, faces and flowers. In the chancel beyond the nave when we visited in November 2022 there was a sanctuary lamp alight and hanging above an aumbry, because the Blessed Sacrament is reserved here, an increasingly rare thing in rural Norfolk. The corner piscina set in the window splay on the north side shows that the chancel was the earliest part of the rebuilding in the late 13th Century. Back in the nave, the south transept was nearly derelict when Mortlock was here in the early 1980s, but today it has been fully restored as the chapel of Corpus Christi and St John, reflecting the High Church tradition here. It was the home to the guild of that name at the end of the medieval period.

As you would expect in this part of rural Norfolk, fewer than ten percent of the population of the parish attended the church at the time of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, the majority of local churchgoers preferring the attractions of the village's two non-conformist chapels. No doubt the middle classes sustained the parish church though, and a couple of 19th Century memorials remain to recall them. Ann Lloyd, wife of the vicar of nearby Hindolveston, died in 1805. Her inscription tells us that she was from early youth devoted to the interests of religion, and in the hour of death she experienced comforts of a firm and steady dependence upon her redeemer. She may have known Mary Reeve, spinster, who died in 1830 and was sincerely regretted by those friends to whom her amiable qualities were known and lamented by the poor to whom she was a constant liberal benefactress. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Not grand memorials, but like the church itself, simple and seemly.

Simon Knott, November 2022

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