Three weeks ago I spent a week with my touring caravan at the small Woodstock caravan site (thankfully no clubhouse or vans all in rows), Gibbet Lane, Boughton – the parish where I grew-up. Apart from local walks and visiting niece and husband in Kings Lynn three things deserve mention here.
On a bitterly cold and wet late April day I re-visited Thetford near the Norfolk-Suffolk border. As well as boasting the location (along with the surrounding Breckland) for the early filming of episodes of ‘Dad’s Army’, the birthplace of the 18th century radical thinker and writer Thomas Paine and the first British town to have a black mayor (1904) Thetford has un-rivalled surviving evidence of its pre-historic and medieval built environment – at least for a relatively small market town.
The vast earthworks surviving in what is now a public park are the product of ramparts for an Iceni tribal centre with a massive Norman motte superimposed.
For a brief time, during the reign of Edward the Confessor, the chair of the bishop of East Anglia was moved from North Elmham to church of St Mary the Great, Thetford. However cathedral status was transferred to Norwich in 1094 with the building there of the new Norman church. The medieval grammar school at Thetford evolved on the site of the Anglo-Saxon church. Sports teams from Downham Market Grammar School use to play those at Thetford Grammar School in the 1960s, I seem to remember we usually lost.
Reputedly ‘Thetford’s oldest standing church’, St. Mary the Less now stands in a very sad state of modern disrepair,
Like Beverley Thetford had a dense concentration of pre-Reformation religious house complexes. The site of a pre-Conquest Benedictine abbey, on land between the Rivers Thet and Little Ouse, later became a nunnery and then, post-Reformation, a domestic residence. The house and grounds, now the hq. of the British Trust for Ornithology, incorporate many surviving medieval features. Three friary building complexes developed in the 14th century. The vast site and standing ruins of the pre-Reformation Cluniac priory stand above the River Little Ouse valley. Here the ruins provide clear evidence of the site of the church, cloisters, prior’s lodgings, gatehouse and Lady chapel. Since its dissolution the freestone (facing stone of the walls) has been removed but much core walling remains largely because the flint stones of the core were set in a heavy lime mortar.
A steam engine museum, watermill and some surviving medieval housing add further to Thetford’s interest. The Heritage town trail is recommended.
Secondly I visited (again) the complex of sluices at Denver, just south of Downham Market (see above).