At last, I'd come back to Norfolk after almost two years away. And it felt like a world away, for the last time I'd cycled these north Norfolk lanes had been in the summer of 2019 when I was still working in a job that took up fifty to sixty hours of my life a week, and stealing Saturdays for church exploring. Autumn and winter came, and then of course the pandemic, and the Church of England's Great Covid Panic when all of its churches were ordered to lock their doors (that some of them refused to do so is greatly to their credit). Now it was the late spring of 2021 and a sense of proportion was, if not actually being restored, seen as a possible course of action. But my life had changed in other ways, for now I had retired, and two days after taking possession of my first Senior Railcard I set out for Norfolk again.

If Hanworth church had ever noticed my absence it would have forgotten me long ago, for although I had regularly cycled the lanes around it over the years I had not been to Hanworth since the summer of 2005. And so I remembered nothing at all about it, except perhaps the setting by the Hall and that first sight of it as you come down the sweeping road from Hanworth Common.

The current Hall was built for Robert Doughty in the early years of the 18th Century after its predecessor was destroyed by fire in the 1680s.The Doughty family had long ruled the roost in this parish as we will see inside the church, but Robert's lack of an heir caused possession to pass through the hands of increasingly distant relatives until 1900 when the estate was sold to the banking Barclay family.

This must have been a stark and simple church before the end of the 15th Century when an aisle and clerestory were added to the south side. Pesvner though the aisle humble, which is about right, and if one was ever planned for the north side it was never built before the Reformation intervened. You step into a simple, fairly crisp interior, the featureless octagonal font difficult to date but probably 14th Century. There is hardly any stained glass, but romantic wall paintings either side of the east window add a touch of colour and probably date from the first decade of the 20th Century, perhaps coinciding with the Barclays arriving on the scene. It might be safe to assume that the interior had been neglected during the preceding century.

There are Barclay and Doughty memorials, the latter family contributing some characterful ledger stones. Those to the west of the nave remember an earlier Robert Doughty and his wife Hester, their inscription consisting of their initials and two hands holding a heart. Above them are inscriptions for several infant children and a sister of Robert's. William, his brother, has an inscription further east that tells us that after 11 years travell into ye Barbados & other trancemarine countrys safely arrived at this his native towne & when he had with great joy seene all his friends & neighbours tooke his leave & returned to ye universall place ye Earth (where all must rest till ye sound of ye trump) at ye age of 40 years on ye 8th day of March 1672/3.

A curiosity is the Doughty family pew, tucked into the west end of the south aisle with an urn dated 1766 above it. On this warm spring day the redundant calor gas heaters were stacked against it, turning their heads towards it like a pack of attacking triffids.

Simon Knott, May 2021

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