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St Margaret, Wicken Bonhunt

Click on the 'play' symbol in the second image to see all my photographs of this church as a slide show, then click on any image in the slideshow to see it large in a new page. Alternatively, if you don't have flash enabled, you can go straight to the set for this church on flickr. Closed, and apparently converted into a community centre. This church has an interesting story - this is a bog standard little 19th Century church with few redeeming features other than its delectable setting on a slope behind the village pub, but in the 1850s the Vicar here was John Hanson Sperling, who was an antiquarian and writer about the medieval churches of Shropshire. He tore down the old church and rebuilt it entirely to his own designs. Unfortunately for us, this included destroying East Anglia's most westerly complete round tower. 'Perhaps he thought he knew what he was doing", writes James Bettley in the revised BoE, 'but the result is lifeless, with surprising lapses - the chancel is lower than the nave, there is no vestry (!) and there was a stove in the chancel beside the priest's chair.' You can still see the chimney for the last. Sperling's tower was itself replaced after becoming dangerous in the early 20th Century, so we lost a round tower for nothing. The church is not redundant, it has simply changed use, and I believe is still used for some evangelical form of worship. The furnishings have been dispersed except for the font and the altar, and the only thing of importance here, GF Bodley's banner for the Guild of St Margaret, is now on the wall at Arkesden, where I had photographed it that morning. But this was a pleasant spot to sit and eat lunch in the full sunshine, before heading back towards Clavering and turning off on to a steep, steep narrow lane which climbed to the top of the ridge and I was the highest I had been all day. I could see the planes landing and taking off at Stanstead in the valley, some six miles away. The lane spiralled down I could see before me, in the middle of nowhere, Rickling parish church. Simon Knott, May 2013

 

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home - index - latest - e-mail
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Norfolk churches - Suffolk churches
www.simonknott.co.uk