Norfolk is home to about 900,000 people, roughly the same as neighbouring Cambridgeshire, but Norfolk is almost twice as big, which is to say there is a lot of space out there. The village of South Pickenham sits between Watton and Swaffham, hardly two of East Anglia's most urban towns by any measure. Out here, the lanes meander as if they have no particular business to attend to, and near a junction with the main road on the edge of the Hall Park sits this endearingly lovely round-towered church. It made me think of what the philosopher Roger Scruton has called the enchantment of England, a land possessed by its own story, and by the story of its people. All Saints feels like something that was built from the ground up by people who knew they were the land's before the land was theirs.

A Norman arch inside reveals that this is a 12th Century round tower, but given its disproportionate width, it was probably reduced in height in the 14th Century when there was a major building programme here. This was when the nave and chancel were rebuilt, and the octagonal bell stage was added to the top of the tower. So far, not so very unusual, but there are idiosyncrasies to this building, a fat little chimney on the north side of the nave, a nave roof that feels like opening wings behind the steepness of the chancel roof. The nave roof collapsed in the early 16th Century and was rebuilt, and then there was a major restoration in the first decade of the 20th Century, a date which coincides with the building of the adjacent Hall. Pevsner notes that Pickenham Hall was built in an Arts and Crafts style by the architect Robert Weir Schultz, and perhaps he was responsible for what happened here too.

I hadn't been back to South Pickenham church for about ten years, and I was in for a surprise. I remembered the interior as being a charming rural space with simple furnishings doing the jobs they'd done for generations, but since my last visit the church has fallen into disuse. There is still a key available to visitors, but you step into an interior that was hidden under dust sheets and layers of bat poo. This is a disappointing outcome, particularly because the church contains one of the major East Anglian art treasures of the 19th Century. This is the organ which Augustus Pugin designed for West Tofts, his rural masterpiece, now marooned within the British Army's battle training area and inaccessible to the general public. It is an extraordinary sight in the gallery here, which at the time he designed it would have been home to the the village band or perhaps a crowd of workhouse children. The wings open out to show images of the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi, and it was moved here in the 1950s.

There are a number of other survivals of interest. When the roof was rebuilt in the early 17th Century the wall plates were decorated with an array of jolly cherubs. Below them, there is is a 15th Century wall painting of St Christopher, familiar enough in the churches of east Norfolk but unusual out here to the west. Some other faded wall paintings are 16th Century Elizabethan texts. The piscina in the sanctuary and the font beneath the gallery are both 14th Century, presumably installed here when the church was rebuilt. There is no chancel arch, but just to the west of the beam that would once have contained a tympanum there are two corbels which supported the rood beam, one a dragon and the other an angel.

There are several 20th Century memorials to the Moreton family of the Hall, and out in the churchyard a headstone remembers Guy Moreton, who died in 1987, as the devoted squire of this parish. I'm sure he'd be unhappy to see the state of decline here. In this day and age there are plenty of rural churches which are thriving by extending their activities beyond the Sunday Club, and it seems a shame that there was not the same energy here to prevent this church falling out of use. The church is now in the care of a new initiative of the Diocese, the Norwich Diocesan Churches Trust, which has taken on half a dozen or so churches that parishes were no longer competent to care for. The plan is for them to be maintained and occasionally used for services, although these are obviously still early days in that process at South Pickenham.

Simon Knott, October 2022

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