St Nicholas, West Lexham

You don't have to go far off of the busy Swaffham to Fakenham road to find an East Anglia as quiet as anywhere, and particularly here, where the chalklands become high Norfolk. St Nicholas is barely a mile from that road, but as with its near-neighbour East Lexham it is sunk deep into a peaceful torpor, an ancient tower on an ancient site, only birdsong for company. On my first visit back in 2005 I managed to shatter this peace completely by rousing two mad little dogs in the garden of the cottage by the gate into the churchyard. They went into a barking frenzy that didn't abate until their owner had strong words with them. I had completely forgotten about this until I came back, after several uneventful revisits in between times, on a cold, crisp day in January 2022 with fellow explorer Cameron Self, and two dogs erupted in the same cottage garden. Were they the same dogs? I like to think so, and that they remembered me and were even pleased to see me. We were obviously the most exciting thing that had happened to them in ages.

The round tower is a non-identical twin to that of its neighbouring parish church a mile or so off at East Lexham. When I'd last been this way I'd found it like a great melting cheese. In the 1990s it was found to be collapsing, and so metal bands and staples were applied to hold it together, and this was then rendered (you can see this in the fourth photograph at the top). However, since my last visit this render has been removed, and the rubble walls have been painted white. The church against it was almost entirely derelict by the middle of the 19th Century as the crude contemporary drawing at the bottom of this page shows. Only the chancel, open to the west, survived in the ruin. The church was rebuilt in the 1880s at the expense of Francis Fenwick Reavely, the rector. A tablet in the chancel records that it was in memory of his beloved wife Frances Abby Reavely who laid the foundation stone of this church on the XXVIth day of August and died on the Vth day of November following MDCCCLXXXI AD. The rebuilding reused materials from the old church. The window tracery on the south side of the chancel appears to match that shown in the drawing of the ruin, except that the windows are at different heights, so presumably the tracery was reused. Pevsner thought the chancel arch was 14th Century, although it isn't there on the drawing, so perhaps the masonry was rescued and then reused?.

You step into what is an unsurprisingly complete late Victorian interior, though one with more gravitas than its rustic neighbour across the fields at East Lexham. The font is an oddity. It appears to be cobbled together, what seems to be a small square Norman bowl (but was it ever a font?) set on an octagonal stem and base giving something of the effect of a raised sink. Another curiosity is that the stained glass figure of Christ in the east window was commissioned from a French workshop, Louis Lobin of Tours. It is surrounded by scenes in the life of Christ in the 13th Century French cathedral style. Presumably it was the choice of Francis Reavely, and it was an unusual one, for there is no other glass by the workshop in the whole of East Anglia. It must have cost a fortune. But the lovely early 20th Century locally-made alms box with its carved relief of a donkey asserts that West Lexham was a place of the ordinary folk as well.

Simon Knott, January 2022

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