St Mary Magdalen, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen, Norfolk
You cross the extensive, lazy Good Ouse, and at after Norfolk modifications. The rippling countryside flattens out, the horizon straightens. Norfolk’s trees disappear, aside from the odd a single or two that flame like beacons below the perpendicular sky. There usually are not genuinely fields anymore, just extensive prairies, and the villages are perfunctory. This is the Marshland.
Pevsner mentions pretty several structures west of the Ouse – except the good church buildings, some of which are amongst England’s finest. In his book England’s Thousand Finest Church buildings, Simon Jenkins contains no less than ten of the Norfolk marshland churches. There are only nine for the complete of Northumberland.
Magdalen is, potentially, shut enough to the rest of Norfolk to however be a right East Anglian village, and a quite a single at that. A person to savour if you are heading west and about to tip off the edge of the real county into that bizarre, sinking landscape past inexorably, h2o spilt in this article would roll into Lincolnshire. But the church is a marshland church, large bold and lovely with that air of chiarascuro familiar from its neighbours, a marginally decayed attractiveness with the scent of aged wooden and damp in the air.
The village will take its title from St Mary of Magdala, of program, for the reason that it is actually one particular of the Wiggenhalls. About the decades, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalene has turn out to be a bit of a mouthful, particularly provided the presence of the close by parish of Wiggenhall St Mary, wherever there is no true village. So, Magdalen it has develop into, incidentally providing its title to a railway station on the Cambridge to Kings Lynn line. St Mary of Magdala is a single of my favorite Saints, and so it was a enjoyment to pay a visit to a whole village named soon after her. The church is a attractive assemblage of purple brick, flint and stone, wholly organic as it rises venerably in the slim graveyard. It is all pretty much 15th century, constructed on wool funds, though as is frequent in East Anglia the good tower is earlier, on the eve of the Black Dying. If it had at any time been rebuilt, this would have been one particular of the most superb church buildings in England.
You stage into a massive developing, whole of light, a dusty air slipping slowly but surely. At the west stop, there is a odd minimal door into the foundation of the tower – I wonder if the rebuilding of the nave elevated the stage of the floor – and on both aspect of it the continues to be of the rood screen are propped up, just four panels depicting the evangelistic symbols. Now, this is pretty curious – the symbols do not typically surface on roodscreens. My instinct was that they could possibly be later on, but the operate unquestionably seems medieval, and the experience of Matthew’s winged man has been scratched out.
Substantially of the character of the nave arrives from the woodwork, a pleasing mixture of very simple medieval benches and 19th century box pews beneath the primary 15th century roof, which is relatively rustic in character with alternating hammerbeams and queen posts.
Just as neighbouring Wiggenhall St Mary has the major assortment of medieval bench ends in Norfolk, St Mary Magdalen has the greatest collection of 15th century stained glass figures. There are about forty of them, scattered in the higher lights of the north aisle. On the other hand, they are instead specialist selection, and not effortlessly identifiable to the untutored eye, for the reason that relatively than acquainted Apostles and Saints they largely characterize Bishops, Archbishops and Popes.
Simon Cotton, in the church information, delivers an exceptional important to them. Ann Eljenholm Nichols’ e book Early Art of Norfolk, most likely the greatest guide ever written about the medieval churches of Norfolk, demonstrates that extra than a several of them are exceptional representations in the county, and most likely in the Kingdom. Most of them have scrolls, and with binoculars you can decipher some of the inscriptions, but number of have their familiar symbols with them.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2016-09-10 09:25:34
Tagged: , Wiggenhall , Mary , Magdalene , magdalen , Norfolk , East Anglia
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