All Saints, Waterden

As you head eastwards from the Creakes, there is a change. The lanes narrow, the hedgerows become higher. The churches are smaller, more remote, the villages tiny if they exist at all. You are entering the orbit of Walsingham, perhaps the most intensely spiritual rural area of England, and there is magic in the air. About halfway along the long narrow lane between South Creake and North Barsham a track leads off down into the fields, and in a secretive huddle of trees there is a little church. For many years it was disused, but the Norfolk Churches Trust, under the guidance of the redoubtable Lady Harrod, took it under its wing, and eventually returned it to parish use. This is all the more extraordinary because, really, there isn't a parish, or at least there are hardly any people. Apart from a single farm there are no other buildings.

As you'd expect, this was a Norman church, but it seems to have been an adaptation of an even earlier one, given the tapering double splays of a couple of upper windows, which are surely Saxon. Changing fashions brought new window tracery and a tower which came and went, its ruined base surviving to the west. You step into a charming space, box pews facing towards the light of a wide sanctuary beyond the rounded chancel arch. The walls are white, the floors are made of brick, there is no coloured glass. You'd struggle to find a more basic font anywhere in East Anglia. It is a space which is not easily forgotten.

If you had come this way in any of the last ten-odd years, your chances of seeing inside would have been hit-and-miss, for the little church has been undergoing an intense period of TLC. But this is now complete. The parish of South Creake maintains regular services here, and the church, like so many in this area, is always open.

Simon Knott, May 2022

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