The Little Ouse and the Waveney form most of the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, and the southern strip of the northern county can seem a forgotten land. Apart from the lovely town of Diss, there is nothing of any size along the border between Thetford in the west and Yarmouth in the east, nothing but winding lanes, forgotten hamlets, woodlands and marshes. Between Diss and Thetford, the lanes off of the main road dogleg and meander, as if they are in no particular hurry to get anywhere. Tracks head into the Breckland, splaying out towards the border, the occasional scattering of houses showing that they have a purpose, or had once. Some of these were forest roads, others recall how busy this area was during the Second World War. Occasionally, a village is big enough to support shops and pubs, a local centre. A good example is East Harling, where the magnificent church will be familiar to many..

But there is another Harling, or, perhaps, several. Long tracks that run off into the woods and fields take you to the lost villages of Middle Harling, Harling Thorpe and West Harling. And here, half a mile from the nearest road, sits another grand church in the sheep meadows cut out of the woods. This is All Saints, the former parish church of West Harling, redundant these past fifty years and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. The first sight of it, across a field a hundred or so metres from the gate, is not easily forgotten. Two stark conifers are a counterpoint to the lighter green of the meadow. In spring and early summer the picture is completed by exuberant birdsong and the plaintive hubbub of the sheep. On a winter's day the fields and trees are silent, apart from the occasional slam of a shotgun in the woods, the distant barking of a dog. The 14th Century tower stands against a 13th Century nave and chancel, which were improved in the 15th Century without any major alterations. There was some money here in the late medieval period, but not too much. The tower was once taller and had a stone spire as at nearby Banham, but it was taken down in the middle of the 18th Century. The brick parapets date from this time. A couple of decades earlier a south transept was demolished, but you can still see the outline, and the window set in it was probably the south window of the transept moved back into the nave wall.

The opening arrangements for the church seem erratic (I was told in August 2022 that the church was locked because of concern about the activities of some of those staying on the adjacent camp site) and it's worth sounding out access before you visit. The Churches Conservation Trust website claims the church is open from 10am to 4pm each day, but this was clearly not the case, and indeed I have never found this church open. When I first came this way at the start of the century the church had the most rude and obstructive keyholder I have ever encountered, but she is no longer with us. Be that as it may, we eventually tracked down a key, and we stepped into an interior which, not unreasonably, seems unused. The overall feel is of the 1907 restoration, for not a lot else happened afterwards. But there are older survivals, among them a good collection of figure brasses. They date from the late 15th and early 16th Centuries. The splendidly-named Ralph Fulloflove was Priest, and his inscription tells us that he died in MCCCC septuagesimo nono, which is to say 1479. He wears his eucharistic vestments. There are two pairs of brasses to successive generations of the Berdewell family, William and Elizabeth of 1490 and William and Margaret of 1508. Both Williams wear armour, while their wives are in the fashions of the day.

There are some fragmentary figures in late 15th glass too, all apparently of the Norwich school. St Margaret kills her dragon, but she has been given the bald head of St Paul, his sword held beside him. St Catherine holds her wheel and sword, but she has been given the head of a medieval angel. There is an imposing Big House family pew shoe-horned into the south-east corner of the nave, a sequence of brass inscription plates above it facing back to the west. They served as a reminder of who was in charge in this parish, both to the preacher across the nave in his pulpit, and to the rest of the congregation as well. You cannot see the altar from the Big House pew, but that did not matter, for until the late 19th Century Anglican revival it was the pulpit rather than the altar that was the focus, and the best-attended service was the Sunday afternoon sermon. At the time of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship about fifty people attended the sermon here, roughly half the population of the parish, which consisted almost entirely of the people at the Big House and their servants and estate workers.

Up in the chancel, Richard Gipps' bust of 1780 looks down on everything, but of course not very much happens here for him to see now. There is the sense of a church which was reinvented over the centuries for successive changes in liturgical and doctrinal fashions, but it has now exhausted itself, and finds itself stuck forever in that uneasy late 19th and early 20th Century attempt to escape the centuries of protestant dourness. And yet, about twenty years ago I was here on a bright sunny day in the middle of December, and at two o'clock in the afternoon the sun was already swinging low to the west. As it did so, it filled the great window below the tower with coloured light, flooding this across the decalogue boards that had been reset there. The kaleidoscope of shapes seemed appropriate, as if reminding us that the Mystery of God was always more than mere words.

Simon Knott, October 2022

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