St Mary, Rockland St Mary

I do love the little agricultural parishes of south-east Norfolk, their shapes carved out by energetic Anglo-Saxons a millennium-and-a-half ago, their small, busy working villages still belonging to the land. The narrow lanes are like a web spread between the Yare and the Waveney, rolling aimlessly between one settlement and another. Rockland St Mary sits not far from the road to Beccles, and was one of five Rockland parishes, two of them here and the other three across the county near Attleborough. One church in each group is now a ruin, and the name Rockland means, pleasingly, 'rooky wood' in Old Norse. The ruin of Rockland St Margaret church is now just a stub of wall to the east of the church here, one of a number of examples in East Anglia of the churches of two parishes once sharing the same churchyard.

St Mary has one of those slender 14th Century towers that seem to have been a fashion around here. This makes the church beside it seem larger than it is, though there are no aisles or clerestories. You might think from the Perpendicular window tracery of the nave that it was a late medieval rebuilding. This may be so, but there was a major restoration in the 1890s when, as Pevsner puts it, the rest was mostly renewed. He credits the Hotblack family with bankrolling the restoration, and the addition of a south porch and north vestry in the 1930s.

You step into a church which feels full of light, an uplifting interior on this sunny day. Everything is in proportion, a pleasingly intimate space. The glass does not impose or intrude The east window is just a small lancet, and Alfred Wilkinson's 1940s Blessed Virgin and Christ child which is set in it enhances the quiet, prayerful sanctuary. Wilkinson's too is the proud St George standing over a defeated dragon. There are some large 19th Century heads of female saints set in the clear glass of the nave. I think they must have been studio offcuts, because it is hard to see that the full scenes of which they were once a part would have fitted into any of the windows here.

Rockland St Mary has long been a joint parish with Hellington, and the church there is now redundant and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. Interestingly they have similar cast-bronze war memorials, presumably commissioned from the same foundry. The one at Hellington is signed Miller, 1919. Each lists all the men of their parish who went off to fight, separating the dead into Killed in Action and Dead and Missing. There are an awful lot of them, and the experience of this appalling event would change rural East Anglia for ever.

Simon Knott, December 2022

Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.