St Andrew and All Saints, Wicklewood

I'm currently engaged on revisiting Norfolk's churches after my first exploration of the county back at the start of the century. Of course, I've been to a fair number of them again in the years since, but I had not been back to Wicklewood for sixteen years, and so I wondered what I would find. The church is set pleasingly in the old village centre which is where several roads meet, and it must once have been a more significant place, its church an important landmark on journeys.

The tower at Wicklewood is set on the south side of the nave, doubling as a porch. This arrangement is more common in the Ipswich area, and all together East Anglia has thirty towers like this, and nine of them are in Norfolk. Howard Stephens, in a recent article for the Suffolk Historic Churches Trust, has argued convincingly that they all lie in the watersheds of river valleys that can be reached upstream from Ipswich and Norwich, apart from two which might be approached from the Great Ouse at Kings Lynn. It seems likely that they are all the work of a single Ipswich-based mason or his imitators. Pevsner records that there are two rooms above the porch, both with fire places.

The nave was rebuilt with large, perpendicular windows in the 15th Century, the 'walls of light' typical of that date, although the effect is spoiled somewhat here because they have been filled with murky quarries. Some of these are broken, and in the east window one hole has an old wasps' nest set in it, suggesting that it has been damaged for some time. Incidentally, the east window itself is a late 19th Century replacement, and if you look at the blocks of stone where the headstops should be you can see that they were never carved. Perhaps they ran out of money, and money is clearly in short supply here now judging by the state of the building. I peered through one window and could just make out the dust and dirt inside. I wondered if the church had fallen out of use, perhaps as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but a small sign on the locked porch doors claimed it was open for private prayer on a Wednesday morning, the wording suggesting that it was a recent notice. However, although I was there at the prescribed time, the church was inaccessible.

I remembered thinking that the interior was rather sombre on the occasion of my only other visit, a late afternoon in the winter of 2005, but the font was elegant, with a crocketed cover, and some of the benches were old. There was a fine early 20th Century reredos painting depicting the Last Supper. Best of all were the pair of medieval glass figures in a north nave window, one depicting Christ blessing his mother at the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, and the other a composite figure with an angel head. The memorial to Bartholomew and Elizabeth Stone records that she was much lamented by all who knew her, a reminder of how the language has changed since the 1720s. I assume all these things are still there, although the medieval glass at least must be considered at risk now. The photographs below are those I took sixteen years ago.

Simon Knott, August 2021

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