The Assumption, West Barsham

The exterior of this church is so neat, and its churchyard so trim, that it takes you a moment to realise that you are looking at something older than most Norfolk churches, for this is substantially a pre-Conquest building as the round windows on the north side suggest, and other details confirm. And yet one gets so used in the Walsingham area to churches having a sense of antiquity, as if it was only the power of prayer that was keeping it up, that it feels odd to be standing beside this little one which could have been turned out crisp from the oven that morning. This is perhaps a mark of its restoration as late as the late 1930s by Walter Caroe, making it quite different in character to so many of its neighbours. The south doorway, a rounded arch set within a pointed arch, seems too like that at nearby Little Snoring for it to be a coincidence and must have been a local fashion.

The Assumption is, I am afraid to say, different to all the other churches around here for another reason, for it is kept locked, although there is now a keyholder notice. Of the forty churches in the Walsingham area that I visited over three days in April 2022 this was the only one that was locked. This has been the case on a number of visits I've made over the last twenty years. I'm told that it is because the church has been targeted in the past and has had several valuable and irreplaceable items stolen. Through the windows you can make out Caroe's pointed chancel arch which Pevsner likened to Eric Gill's work across Norfolk at Gorleston St Peter, as well as the 1950s benches and the north chancel window featuring a young girl with lambs, both the work of Margaret Tarrant. It would be nice to see them at closer quarters, but on this occasion it wasn't possible.

Simon Knott, May 2022

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