Church crawling in Norfolk

I have just returned from a most enjoyable weekend visiting
friends in north-west Norfolk. It was a great pleasure to meet
up with them again and catch up on news and plans for the future.

There was the additional pleasure of having some time with them
to do some church-crawling - something very easy in Norfolk
with its vast wealth of medieval churches. I like that part of
Norfolk, having got to know parts of it on pilgrimages to
Walsingham over the years. The train journey provided a
fine view of Ely cathedral and it occurred to me that the profile
of the west tower may well have inspired the design of that of
Great St Mary's in Cambridge.

The first visit was to St Edmund in Downham Market, where my friends are currently living. The church was in the possession of Ramsey abbey in the middle ages and the building has a style less typical than other Norfolk churches. It has a fine painted consecration cross in the Lady Chapel from, I would guess - I did not have Pevsner to hand - of about 1300, and some interesting stones built into the exterior, including two parts of a rather interesting grave slab. The church is on quite an eminence, with the town clustered around it, looking west across the drained fenland. It is easy to see why it became a fuocus for settlement, commanding that view to the west and the gradual slope eastwards of the fertile low hills of west Norfolk. We visited the delightful town of Castle Acre, which has the great earthworks of its eponymous castle, a town gate, the substantial remains of the Cluniac priory founded in 1089, and the fine medieval church of St James the Great. This was a return visit for me, having been there almost twenty years ago, but still very welcome. We concentrated on this visit on the parish church. There is a good account of it on the Norfolk Churches site here. It has a splendid fifteenth century font cover. I have reproduced their pictures of the wonderful late medieval painted pulpit, decorated with the four Latin Fathers of the Church. We had a speculative discussion as to when exactly the pulpit would have been used within the context of the liturgy when it was installed. We then went on to West Acre - a medieval church substantially restored in what must, I imagine, have originally been a Laudian style in 1638. There is an account here. Immediately to the west of the tower are the substantial ruins of the gatehouse of the Augustinian priory of West Acre, and parts of its ruins could be seen in the grounds of the house beyond. In the parish church was a plan of what had been recovered in excavations of the monastic site. The presence of two substantial, if not enormous, monastic foundations in adjoining communities from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries is yet another indicator of the wealth of medieval East Anglia - notably evidenced by the wondrous array of churches from those centuries. On Sunday morning I went to Mass at the relatively modern church of St Dominic in Downham Market. The fairly recent extension has been further augmented in recent years with a handsome and dignified Sanctuary arrangement in stone, which provided a good setting for a dignified liturgy yesterday morning. The picture below is of the statue of St Dominic which forms part of the reredos.