St Margaret, Kirstead

I came back to Kirstead on a beautiful day in the spring of 2022, and I was surprised to notice afterwards that my previous visit had been on exactly the same day in 2006. But that had been a raw March day of sub-zero temperatures, when this had felt a bleak and remote spot. The skeletal trees shivered in the icy gusts, and St Margaret's narrow nave huddled behind the stark tower as if sheltering from the blast. By contrast, now there was a sense of the world reawakening from the sleep of winter, birds singing and the first spring flowers raising their curious heads. There was, I'm afraid, another difference, for Kirstead church was now kept locked. The notice board in the porch suggested that it would be opening again in the summer months, but for now the photographs at the bottom of this page are from that visit in 2006.

At one time this was a thatched church with a bellcote, as a mid-19th Century photograph hanging in the church shows. But in 1864 it was almost completely demolished and rebuilt at the expense of the Kerrison family. The tower is new, the chancel with its octagonal apse is new, even the nave windows are new. The architect was Herbert Haywood. But the original 12th Century south doorway survives, a reminder of what was here before. You step through it (if you can) into a church which is wholly Victorian in character, with tiled floors softened by blue carpets, a painted font, and the sweetest little 19th Century benches in ranks along the walls. They face into the apse of the chancel with its three angled lancets. There is at least one other survival of the earlier church, a ledger stone now mounted on the wall of the tower, recording the burial of several children underneath a family pew.

The most memorable feature of St Margaret is perhap the range of high quality memorials to members of the Kerrison family. The best of them is immediately beside the south doorway to Roger Allday Kerrison and his wife Adelaide Thorp, which depicts a weeping woman scattering roses on an urn and the inscription After Life's Fitful Struggle They Sleep Well. The church retains the set of bibles and prayerbooks given at the time of its rebuilding, and these help to retain the special atmosphere of a Victorian rural church. You can almost sense the blacksmith and the ploughboy sitting in their smocks on the benches, listening to the Word.

Simon Knott, December 2022

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