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All
Saints, Snetterton
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My
goodness, this is a lonely spot. Here we are in
the narrow lanes north of the A11, which seems to
have taken all the traffic from the parishes
around here. The villages are small, where they
exist at all, mostly straggling thinly along
lanes that dogleg and double-back as if in no
particular hurry to get anywhere. Snetterton
may not have many houses, but it is famous for
its racing track, and you may also have come
across it as the home of the International League
for the Protection of Horses. Their award-winning
building and farm sit beside All Saints, the pair
in splendid isolation in the rolling fields. They
keep the key, but the office is not open on a
Saturday or Sunday, so you will need to visit on
a weekday.
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All Saints
is redundant, unsurprisingly. This seems to have been a
fairly painful process, the church falling into disuse
and then suffering years of vandalism before being
rescued by the Norfolk Churches Trust. It was not thought
an important enough building for the Churches
Conservation Trust to have been asked to take it on, and
so it relies on the tender attentions of local people.
I had seen
some beautiful photographs of the interior on a bright
sunny day; it looked endearingly ramshackle, a creamy
light filling a wide, empty space. But we came here on a
grim March day with a thin, icy drizzle wafting across
the graveyard. We got the key, and let ourselves into a
church which was even colder than outside. The building
was obviously due for a spring clean, and the grey skies
outside made the interior rather gloomy. But I liked the
air of resilience.
This is a
big, mostly 14th century church, elaborated with a large
north aisle a century later. However, the chancel and the
inner doorways of a earlier church survive, and although
the chancel is now pretty well all Victorian, the grand
double piscina of perhaps 1280 survives.
The
rood screen is rather sad, with panels kicked out
and half the arch broken. Pevsner thought it was
all of the 19th century, and that is certainly
true of everything above the dado, but some of
the carving on the dado itself looks as if it
might be medieval. The glass in the east and west
windows is good work by the O'Connors. That in
the nave is less good; Mortlock says it is by the
Covent Garden firm of Cox, Buckley & Son. Joan Porter
died in 1783, but her ledger stone bears an
inscription which would be more at home a century
and a half earlier:
All
you Good People that pass by, Remember Death for
you must die.
As I am now so you must be, Prepare with speed to
follow me.
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