Billockby church is a landmark, alone on a rise to the east of the Acle to Stalham road. There is no other building near. You reach it along tiny lanes cut deep between rolling fields, but in fact these lanes run into busy roads, and Billockby church's isolation is something of an illusion. Nevertheless, it is an easy one to maintain if you stand in the tree-surrounded churchyard, the fields rolling away in all directions, without another human being in sight. Pevsner thought the church was pretty much all of its 15th Century rebuilding, not on a grand scale, but fully Perpendicular. This must have been a fine church once, but the tower was rent asunder by a lightning strike in 1762. Judging by the crack the event was spectacular. I hope nobody was inside the church at the time. As so often happened, falling masonry destroyed the nave, and all that was left was the chancel. However, this proved sufficient for the needs of the congregation, who made it safe, huddled in it miserably until a full-scale restoration of 1872, and left the rest a picturesque ruin. And so it remains. One survival of the collapse was the south porch, which now stands alone against the ruin of the south nave wall. There is some interesting 17th Century graffiti on the eastern jamb of the south doorway, for Henry Mann and William Tooley came to visit from neighbouring Clippesby in May 1671 they made sure that future generations would know about it.

The thatched chancel is cottage-like, and seemed especially so on a sunny spring day in 2011, with the churchyard full of flowers coming into bloom. Coming back in the late summer of 2022 I saw the church on a gloomy day of heavy skies, and the feeling was quite different. One thing I haven't mentioned is that Billockby church is pretty much the only church in the entire Broads area which is kept locked without a keyholder notice. Many must be the pilgrims and passing strangers who make their way up here, but there is no Christian welcome within the gate, I am afraid. So I cannot tell you what the chancel is like inside. Back in 2011 I had written that it is a simple matter to climb over the little fence and into the former nave, where you can stand for a moment and imagine yourself back into the late medieval heyday of the building, before the chancel arch was bricked up and when the devotions of the English Catholic Church rang out within these walls. However, coming back in 2022 I found that that the little fence has gone and it has been replaced with an ugly, spiked security screen on which is set a notice warning WE ARE WATCHING YOU. Was it something that I wrote? More likely it is because a substantial chunk of the south wall has fallen in the years since, and so I am afraid it is no longer possible to stand in the nave.

I think most of us are fascinated by ruined churches, even those like Billockby where a remnant remains in use. Some of the ruined churches you come across in Norfolk are in that state because they were no longer required after the Reformation, and they were simply left to fall. Some, like Billockby, were ruined by misfortune, while others suffered the same fate simply as a result of neglect. But really there is one over-arching imperative that has led to each of their demises, whatever the cause and whenever it happened. This is the nagging doubt that returns again and again to haunt the Church of England: medieval churches were not intended for, and are not ideally suited to congregational Anglican worship.

Simon Knott, October 2022

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