This sweet and rather sad little church sits in an attractive location beside the Hall, not far from the edge of the bleak former RAF Swannington airbase. There isn't much of a village, just a couple of grand houses here and then more houses clustered around Brandiston Common to the north. The parish also includes the former settlement of Guton which is now just a remotely set and rebuilt Hall farm, but at Domesday it was much the larger place, a manor with four carucates of farmed land. A carucate was a measure of the land that could be ploughed in one season by a team of eight oxen - that is to say, Guton was a large manor. It also had woodland for sixty pigs, thirty acres of meadow and twelve hives of bees. We may assume that much of the former manor now forms the current parish of Brandiston. Domesday does not mention everyone living in a manor, but it lists forty-five men at Guton, many of them slaves and bondsmen. By contrast the settlement of Brandiston, which was listed by Domesday under nearby Cawston, listed just four free men, sixty acres of land and meadow, and woodland for six pigs. As late as 1845 White's Directory of Norfolk recorded the parish as Brandiston and Guton, with a total population of 137. There can hardly be a quarter of that number living in the parish today.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Brandiston's little church is now redundant and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. In fact, it was once much smaller, for the round tower sits at the west end of the north aisle which is on the site of the original church. The church was rebuilt during the late 14th Century with a new nave and chancel to the south of the old one. At some point the new chancel was demolished, perhaps because it fell into disuse after the Reformation. In any event Edward Blore came along in 1844 and gave the building a complete makeover at the expense of the Athill family who had recently acquired the Hall. They are remembered by a brass floor plaque by the south doorway, the sort of thing the Ecclesiological Society thought would catch on, but which never really did. Their memorials are also set in the east wall either side of the altar, emphasising a family now in possession.

The tower was almost completely rebuilt at the start of the 20th Century, and pretty much everything you see externally dates from the last 180 years. There is still no real chancel, just the east end of the restored nave kitted out as a shallow sanctuary. Blore's internal furnishings are of a high quality if somewhat austere. The font came later, probably during the 1890s. Apart from one stained glass window by Percy Bacon in the aisle, which Pevsner declared indifferent, the thin light fills the low, continuously roofed nave and aisle from the south, draining all the colour from the place, the bare woodwork of seats and sanctuary beginning to silver. It is easy to imagine that the Victorians who had restored it had then abandoned it, and in the long years since it had quietly faded. It is the kind of interior that aches for something to happen, for a life, but that can never be now.

As if to emphasise this sense of melancholy, there is a heartbreaking tablet in the north aisle remembering Anthony and Preston Enright, sons of the Rector of Brandiston, who were both killed 18 months apart in the First World War, at the ages of 21 and 19 respectively. Preston was killed just a week before the Armistice, and the news must have come through at about the same time. The tablet tells us that it was erected by the parishioners, who must have felt desperately sorry for their pastor, especially as these appear to have been the only boys from the parish to have lost their lives during the conflict.

Simon Knott, May 2021

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