| Here we are in the lost,
lonely lanes of North Norfolk. Probably, few
people know that Oulton exists, and even fewer
that the parish is home to one of the county's
oldest congregational chapels, set at some
distance from the parish church. Here on a tiny backroad beyond
Corpusty, set back from the road and hidden by a
screen of trees is a delicious red brick chapel
of 1728. The frontage might be that of a
farmhouse, but the gables, in the Flemish style
fashionable in the late 17th Century suggest that
there is more going on here than meets the eye,
and also perhaps that is took the fashion a while
to die out in this rural, protestant backwater. The chapel fell into disuse in the
1960s and is now in the care of the Norfolk
Historic Buildings Trust. The internal
furnishings survive more or less in their
original form, but the keyholder was out on the
occasion of my recent visit. Peter Stephens found
it open back in the early years of the 21st
Century, and took these photographs.
 
  
Of course, as
a chapel it was never a consecrated building, and
I am told it is now available for hire for
weddings, concerts, meetings and the like, which
should be enough to ensure its survival. There
are a handful of headstones in the surrounding
burial ground which make interesting reading for
an insight into 19th and 20th Century
Congregationalism in a remote spot.
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