All Saints, Gillingham

Three churches sit in a row along the western side of the Park of Gillingham Hall, and the ruin of All Saints is the most northerly of the three. You can catch a glimpse of it from the busy Beccles to Norwich road, which cuts the village of Gillingham off from its churches. There were bequests to the building of the tower in the 1470s, but the church fell into disuse in the late 17th Century and appears to have been demolished in the 1740s for building materials. When I came this way in the winter of 2005 I found some 18th Century headstones set where the nave and chancel must once have been. The tower survived and still stands, though the site is now so overgrown that when I came back in October 2021 it was no longer possible to approach it, or even to take a decent photograph of it.

Simon Knott, October 2021

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