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LANGFORD STANFORD TOTTINGTON WEST TOFTS
St Andrew, Tottington
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St
Andrew, Tottington There is a curiosity awaiting the unknowing
visitor to the nearby village of Thompson, for the signs
that point towards Tottington down the lanes from
Thompson's high street warn you road closed ½ mile, as if this might be
a temporary measure. In fact, they have been closed for
almost eighty years, for Thompson sits hard against the
edge of the Norfolk Battle Training Area, and the parish church of Tottington is is one of
the four churches of the Battle Training Area and is not
generally accessible by the public. But if you are
fortunate to be allowed to visit it you enter a place
which is quite unlike any other. This is the Breckland, a
landscape that in Tottington has almost entirely rewilded
itself. On the day I first
visited back in May 2004 the place was alive with the
sounds of spring. All around, the wind ruffled the waves
of coarse grass, but the oblivious sheep wandered slowly,
their new lambs skittering in their wake. As we
approached Tottington church up what was, eighty years
ago, the village high street, a handsome buck deer
stepped out of the reeds beyond the track. He didn't
flinch, but watched us with curiosity. Here, a row of
brick-built council houses still stands, refurbished as a
northern Irish village during the time of the conflict
there, and later repurposed as an Afghan village, but the
Norfolk clunch cottages that once kept them company have
otherwise gone back to ground, melting down as the
decades pass. Here and there, a chimney stands defiantly,
but that is all. As at Stanford, the
chancel seems small after this wideness. The Victorian
decalogue boards still stand where the altar once was.
This must have been a busy place in medieval times,
because as well as the elegant sedilia and piscina in the
chancel, there is a dropped-sill sedilia at the eastern
end of the south aisle, and a pretty little piscina in an
angle at the eastern end of the north aisle. In the floor
are 18th Century ledger memorials to Knopwoods and
Farrers, and wall memorials remember Duffields and Hares.
High above, patient faces stare from the corbels of the
arcades. However, nearly two hundred people were at Tottington church for the afternoon sermon, a figure made more impressive by the fact that there was also an afternoon sermon at Stanford where roughly fifty people were in attendance. The afternoon sermon was almost always more popular than the morning service in East Anglia, but the disparity in the two figures suggests something else going on. Most likely, the greater part of the population of Tottington were workers on the Walsingham estate, and attendance at the sermon was firmly encouraged by Lord Walsingham, their employer. At the time of the evacuation of the village, the daughter of a later Lord Walsingham, Lavender de Grey, was in her early twenties. In later life she lived at College Farm in neighbouring Thompson, and I met her a few times towards the end of her life, because the late Norfolk churches expert Tom Muckley would stay at the farm when he visited the county. Even in her eighties she was still passionate about the injustice of the villagers not being allowed to return. She lies at peace now near the gate of Thompson churchyard. Simon Knott, May 2004, revised December 2022 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter. an introduction to the churches of the Norfolk battle training area |
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