The town of Downham Market stands astride the scarp slope of the East Anglian Heights (as does Caistor in Lincolnshire) with St Edmund’s church sited at the highest point. As the scarp slope overlooks the level Fens to the west as far as the eye can see the church forms a prominent landmark and, even without its current needle spire (lead-clad), would have been a landmark centuries ago for travellers trying to cross the Fenland wetlands before the large-scale drainage schemes of the 17th century started to transform the Fenland environment. In this sense the church building performed a valued secular function in the same way that coastal church buildings often did (see Landmarks and Beacons in the Publications/Articles section).
St. Edmunds is approached from the town by a steep flight of steps and is surrounded on three sides by its churchyard. The 19th century churchyard extension has nearby (across a public right of way) the civil cemetery with a fine cemetery-mans’ house and chapel of rest near the main entrance. These, and the church itself, are built of car-stone, a strata of friable stone within the chalk and the local building stone to the area. Not a freestone but a reasonable building stone if coursed in heavy mortar and laid parallel to its bedding plane. The car-stone strata is visible in the cliffs at Old Hunstanton where the chalk escarpment was breached by the mouth of the Wash in recent geological times, the corresponding cliff-line to the north being at Keel in the Holland region of Lincolnshire.
It is through this churchyard that I walked to secondary school between 1959 and 1966 having got off the Eastern Counties bus from Stoke Ferry. Weather permitting my mate and I would sometimes sit on an old bench in the churchyard, the bench is now long-gone.