There is something particularly poignant about a church whose ruination is recent. Until 1940 this was a working building, but it fell into disuse and was declared redundant in 1946. In those unsentimental days it befell the fate of all such abandoned churches, having its roofs removed in a formal act of dereliction. There must be people alive today who remember that happening.

Although not far from a back lane between Colkirk and Whissonsett, there is no proper road to the church and no real village. The church is concealed from the road by a couple of cottages, that's all, but enough to make it easy to forget that it was there. When Bill Wilson visited for the Pevsner revision in 1991 he found it overgrown and inaccessible, a mass of ivy and elder, quietly going back to nature. And that might have been the end of the story. Step in the heroes of Norfolk County Council, who have made it their business to save and consolidate twenty or so of the most significant of Norfolk's hundred-plus ruined churches. In 1993, the ruin was completely cleared of overgrowth, and the walls topped off to prevent further decay. The graveyard was also cleared, and several of the graves showed signs of being recently maintained when I visited in April 2006.

Oxwick had obviously lost its tower some time in the 18th or early 19th Century, and the base of the tower was converted into a shack-like vestry. This looks most odd now that it is roofless. Also odd is the arrangement of windows in the west wall of the nave. There are two high up that must once have flanked the tower which are mysterious. The single surviving window headstop on the south side shows that this might have been quite a grand place once. Poignant beneath it is a fine 18th Century headstone for Thomas Lawrence, with a skull with crossed bones flanked by hour glasses to remind us of our mortality, as if the ruined church wasn't enough.

At the bottom of this page are two photographs kindly contributed to the site, which are both haunting in their own ways. Louisa Sugden sent me the shot of the view looking east inside the church, probably some time in the late 19th Century, and Steve Greef sent me a photograph of his great-grandmother, Mary Greef, standing outside Oxwick church with her donkey at the end of the 19th Century. Where she is standing is now completely overgrown, and the view is impossible today. But here they are, two haunting memories of of a tiny place in Norfolk as it was before we lost it.

Simon Knott, February 2021

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