St Margaret, West Raynham

West Raynham is the largest village on the Raynham estate, the handsome estate village right at its heart. Unlike the other villages on the estate, however, it no longer has its own parish church. St Margaret was abandoned in the 18th Century, and the living consolidated with that of East Raynham, where the church sits beside Raynham Hall. St Margaret must have been a fairly typical church for this part of Norfolk, a small north aisled church of the 14th and 15th Centuries. There seems to have been a processional way beneath the tower.

It is a mark of how our attitudes to ruined churches have changed over the last couple of decades that Pevsner's revising editor, Bill Wilson, came here in the 1990s to find it thickly clothed with ivy and elder. He would be surprised to see that this has now all been removed. As at several other ruins in the Fakenham area, the walls have been topped off to prevent further erosion, the grass is cut, and the gravestones are all accessible. Apart from some wild flowers growing incongruously at the top of the tower, the site has been tamed, and does not seem at all out of place on the main village street. Most wilder ruins, after all, are in the back of beyond, but there are plenty of houses around the churchyard here.

The restorers of West Raynham have gone one better, for the ruin is now home to a modern brick-built altar. And so, for the first time in coming on for three hundred years, St Margaret can be used again, at least when the weather is nice. It must be an atmospheric experience, and moving for people who remember it as Bill Wilson saw it.

The churchyard is also still in use. The memorial to Ethel Boggis, who died in 1937, tells us that it also remembers her husband Arthur, presumed killed in France in July 1917. That this inscription can't have been written until more than twenty years after his assumed death makes it all the more poignant, as does the verse below from a Frances Ridley Havergal hymn of the 1860s, largely forgotten now but popular at the time: Light after darkness, gain after loss, Strength after weakness, crown after cross. Another nearby tells us that this stone is Erected by Friends and Pupils as a Mark of Respect and Esteem in fond Remembrance of Horace Beck Scott, who for 5 years Faithfully Discharged the Duties of Pupil teacher in the Helhoughton School and was Called to his Rest April 13th 1882 Aged 21 years.          

Simon Knott, October 2021

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