St Nicholas, Twyford

This sad little church sits cut off from its village by the awful traffic of the Norwich to Fakenham road. Pevsner pointed out the single lancet up in the gable of the west end and pronounced the church Norman, and that may well be so, although if he'd stopped and thought for a moment he might have wondered why it was so high up. The gable at least seems to have been rebuilt, and there's some repair work lower down, although it seems unlikely that there was ever a west tower. The nave and chancel run continuously under one roof, although this may not always have been the case because there is a clear division between the two. The most memorable feature of the exterior is the splendid redbrick structure which doubles as both porch and tower, as if in imitation of East Anglia's thirty-odd medieval south towers, a dozen or so of which are in Norfolk. It is dated 1757, and there is no reason to think that it replaced an earlier south tower.

When I first visited and wrote about St Nicholas in 2006 I mused that, as the Church of England retreated from public view, this was exactly the kind of church that I expected to come back to in thirty years time and find surrounded by high brambles, as if it was Sleeping Beauty's castle. Well, sixteen years have passed, and coming it back in September 2022 it struck me that process was well underway, for the church appears to have been abandoned. There no longer appear to be any service (perhaps they've moved them on line) and the parapet of the brick porch/tower is crumbling, the fallen bricks scattered across the overgrown path. I assume that if the church was still in use someone would have erected a safety fence by now.

The church was locked, and so I am thrown back on my memories of previous visits, and the photographs below taken on those occasions. I recall a simple, homely interior, a large square font, presumably from the 12th Century, supported on the hefty pillars of a colonnade, and an imposing late 19th Century alabaster reredos. There is a 19th Century crucifixion scene in the east window that looks as if it might be early work by Ward & Hughes. Glass of 1915 in a lancet depicts Christ crowning St George, a typical sentiment during those war years. The stained glass expert Birkin Haward was obviously having a bad day when he visited this neck of the woods (see also Bintree) for he credited the glass to Wm Morris & Co, despite there being, as he noted, no visible connection to Morris! In fact it is signed by William Morris of Westminster, a quite different workshop, and, indeed, a quite different William Morris. I assume he must have misread his notes.

Simon Knott, September 2022

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