They are the ghosts of Easter – past, present and future. The four medieval churches that stand on the 12,140-hectare (30,000-acre) military base known as the Norfolk battle training area near Swaffham have been empty since the whole area was taken over as part of the war effort in 1942, and the 1,000-strong population of the villages they served – West Tofts, Stanford, Langford and Tottington – were forcibly and unhappily removed.
They were never let back in, and the last survivor among the displaced died in 2019. These churches are, as I saw last month when I joined the annual tour that the military allows, relics in a very literal sense of Easters past. Eight decades ago, the main festival of the Christian calendar would have seen their pews full because they were at the very heart of village life, just as Anglicanism was part of the fabric of the nation.
The same would have been true of many of the 16,000 Church of England churches whose spires, steeples and towers continue to shape the skyline of our cities, towns and especially our countryside. But they will, this Easter at least, attract a congregation, though surveys suggest it will be just 3% or 4% of the population.
In our transformation from being a Christian society to post-Christianity, and now to what is effectively pre-Christianity since so few of the coming generation have ever heard the most basic details of the Easter story, these four ancient but vacant Norfolk churches offer a sobering perspective. It is highly unlikely they will ever be used again. Our military guide was anxious to stress how vital the battle training area remains to the defence of the realm.
And so they provide a rare glimpse of future Easters when unused but historic church buildings will slowly but surely be falling apart in plain sight because no one believes it is their job to look after them. It was a gloomy conclusion reached during the tour, made all the more poignant by the sense that our group was stepping on what was once sacred ground. Or, as TS Eliot puts it in Little Gidding, “where prayer has been valid”.
One of the four, All Saints in Stanford, the disappeared village that shares my surname, is stripped bare, its roof replaced by panels, its windows shattered and its central arch held up only by scaffolding. But on the positive side, all four are still (some just about) standing, unlike the homes that once clustered around them but are now disappearing under melting mounds of Norfolk clunch. Their unlikely survival is down to an unlikely saviour – the Ministry of Defence, which since 1942 has done routine maintenance on the basis that there would be a public outcry if it let them collapse.
However, even the MoD has noticed the marginalisation of religion in society, and so last year repented of its good works, handing the churches to the cash-strapped diocese of Norwich, which can have no earthly use for them and has many other calls on its coffers.
It has not been just the MoD footing the bill for this commitment to preserving a lost age of faith. While the Stanford church, as well as St Andrew at Tottington, appeared to be in the early stages of rewilding – at the latter a barn owl has made its home in the porch and ivy is creeping in through the broken or missing windows – St Mary’s, West Tofts, is in surprisingly fine fettle thanks to grants from heritage bodies, and the heroic efforts of conservators such as the architect Ruth Blackman, who was our guide.
Given a gothic makeover in the late-19th century by Augustus Welby Pugin, St Mary’s boasts a rood screen so spectacular that it was temporarily removed in 1994 to star in an exhibition at the V&A in London. Today, however, it gathers dust and bat droppings in lonely silence, its prime purpose – to inspire awe and reverence – lost.
Why have these four been kept going, when there is no prospect of them ever being used again? Well, for much the same reason that so many of the beautiful and historically significant old churches that sit in the middle of non-military areas of the countryside continue in operation long after their congregations have dwindled to a handful, resigned to their fate as the last of a long line of worshippers on that spot.
As a society, we want them to be there, as a link with a golden age, a reassurance, a landmark, or just somewhere to shelter from the rain. But we neither wish to worship in them nor shoulder the responsibility for maintaining them, and so have ended up in a situation where we look away in the face of their inevitable decay.
Again, trying to summon the Easter spirit of resurrection, my mind lights on the growing number of self-styled “church crawlers” – a new name for the age-old habit of walking country lanes to admire beautiful churches, which used to be called a pilgrimage. Their numbers are certainly growing, but among those who have little or no interest in institutional religion. And it was institutional religion that built churches and largely still owns and pays for them – monuments to the belief, now fast waning, that believing, in any religious or spiritual sense, was best explored in a community under one church roof of like-minded souls.
We tend to think the opposite now. I’ve lost count of the number of people, many of the generation raised in church schools (another aspect of belonging), who today describe themselves as “spiritual” but with no wish to pin a label to that search according to any rituals and rules laid down by religious institutions.
Perhaps what we need is a President Macron figure. There was a certain ridiculous pomposity when he vowed to rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris after a fire in 2019 because “Notre Dame, c’est nous”. Yet, there is nonetheless something in what he said because these old churches are infused with our collective history.
Instead of his grand designs, we are trying to muddle through by adding toilets and the occasional post office, trying to shoe-horn glorious medieval buildings into the role of ad hoc community centres. It works up to a point, but post offices are struggling to survive, too.
The Heritage Lottery has stopped its designated fund for churches, decreeing in line with secular orthodoxy that they must compete on an even playing field with other, more easily repurposed old buildings. Indefatigable local organisations, such as the Norfolk Churches Trust that organised my tour, cannot be expected to raise sufficient money by their tireless fundraising when its county, thanks to its past prosperity, has more medieval churches to care for than any other.
On the tour with me are some of those who spend their retirement trying to keep their village church going. Most concede it is a battle against the odds. “This is where our church is heading,” laments one as we leave the third on our route, St Andrew’s, Langford, tiny and Norman, but bare and disused. Its last remaining feature is a vulgar outsized white marble tomb to the local Garrard family that is slowly turning green thanks to damp and water incursion.
In the short term, there are organisations including the National Churches Trust, the Churches Conservation Trust and the Friends of Friendless Churches (fittingly, it had sent a representative on our tour) that raise money and receive modest public funds to keep some churches alive, or at least just about intact. Yet their efforts will be dwarfed as remaining congregations slowly but inexorably dry up.
So the Easter puzzler is this: are we really prepared to see our treasury of churches crumble and rot? Or can we prioritise developing a system of public funding to save them – for the nation, as we like to say, but not in a Macron way? If we don’t, the fate of these melancholy churches of the Norfolk battle training area may be coming to a locality like ours some day soon.
Peter Stanford is the author of If These Stones Could Talk: The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland Through Twenty Buildings
