During last summer I visited Ickleton Cemetery Chapel, between Ickleton and Hinxton. The chapel is Victorian and Grade II listed. Built in 1883, in an Early English style, flint with limestone dressings and knapping to the sides and a slated semi-circular roof end.
With double doors to the side is a mortuary chapel and a coffin cart rests inside.
In the graveyard are a set of unusual metal sand cast headstones. Probably made by a company who made fireplaces. An old chap who looks after the graveyard told me that some of them had been stolen, probably for scrap metal as a piece of corrugated iron on top of the compost heap had also been stolen.
The painted grave is one of his relations, and he had repainted them to look as they did when put in. Others have rusted however.
Here are two photographs by John Piper and two paintings, both in different styles. They focus on the such of St Clement’s, in Terrington St Clement. A large village in Norfolk, England. It is situated in the drained marshlands to the south of the Wash, 7 miles west of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and 5 miles east of Sutton Bridge, Lincolnshire, on the old route of the A17 trunk road.
As well as showing the different artistic techniques for one subject, it also shows how Piper used his photographs as a visual reference when back in his studio (as I noted in the post ‘Lens and Pens’).
John Piper – Terrington St Clement Church, 1975.
Five years apart between them both, the 1975 painting is a classic Piper picture and I am amazed it wasn’t editioned into a screen-print as the levels of detail in it are remarkable, the blocked out lighter panels of the windows and reversed light outline of the bell tower against the typical Piper sky.
John Piper – Terrington St Clement Church, Norfolk.
John Piper – Knowlton Church, Dorset, 1938
The picture below from 1980 is far more abstract and wild with colour. It is looking more like a study of a painting. The outlines and abstracted features of the building draughtsmanship are typically Piper. Although the colouring may not look like his works at that time, I would suggest they are a throwback to when Piper used collage in the 1930s. As with the Knowlton Church collage, blocks of colour are used with outlines. It makes an interesting marriage of new and old techniques.
John Piper – Terrington St Clement Church, 1980
John Piper – Terrington St Clement Church, Norfolk.
Below is a video I found on Youtube of a drone flight around the church, I wonder what Piper would have made of such a technology?
Rather like many artists, John Piper used his camera to record places and subjects for later work. Piper began taking the photographs when he worked with John Betjeman on the Shell County Guides in the 1930s.
The subjects before the war were often objects – ironwork, lettering, marine apparatus – bus since then have been more usually of buildings in landscape. The primary purpose has always been to record topographical information. ‡
The landscape photographs are very often to hand when Piper draws the same subject in the studio, along with sketches made at the place and any other available information, but they are not copied. Only in very rare cases – some of the mountain sides in North Wales in the later 1940s and of the Château of Chambord – were photographs squared and transferred to drawings. ‡
Most of the pictures before are editioned as lithographs or screen prints, some of them are paintings while Piper was working on the Recording Britain project.
John Piper – ‘Ruined Church’, Bawsey, 1982. (Editioned Print)
John Piper – ‘Ruined Church’, Bawsey, Near Kings Lynn, Norfolk.
The importance of Piper’s photographs lay less in their technique, which was often little more than competent, but in their subject matter. As in his painting, for which his topographical photographs often acted as preliminary studies, Piper had an unerring eye for exciting what the architectural historian John Summerson called “a new curiosity about unnoticed, unlisted things”.
During the war and after, his photographs illustrated articles he wrote for the Architectural Review trumpeting the virtues of subjects as diverse as flint; shops; the Donegal custom of embellishing its stucco houses with painted quoins and stonework details; the ‘gratuitous semi-circle’ in English late classical architecture; and church towers in Eastern England, which was geographically balanced by an article entitled ‘Warmth in the West’ studying the West of England penchant for painting house exteriors.
Some of the most influential of these were a series he wrote seeking to preserve the unique nature of the British pub. More controversial was the 1947 essay ‘Pleasing Decay’, a plea for structurally sound ruins to be retained for the picturesque delights they would afford. †
John Piper – Llangloffan Baptist Chapel, 1964. (Editioned Print)
John Piper – The Baptist Chapel, Llangloffan, Pembrokeshire.
John Piper – Tithe Barn, Great Coxwell, 1940. (Painted for Recording Britain)
John Piper – Tithe Barn, Great Coxwell, Berkshire.
John Piper – Willington Dovecote, Bedfordshire, 1978. (Editioned Print)
John Piper – Willington Dovecote, Bedfordshire.
John Piper – Church of St. Denis, Faxton, 1940. (Painted for Recording Britain)
John Piper – Church of St. Denis, Faxton, Northamptonshire.
John Piper – Covehithe Church, Suffolk, 1983. (Editioned Print)
John Piper – Covehithe Church, Suffolk
John Piper – Crug Glas, Swansea, 1966. (Editioned Print)
John Piper – Crug Glas, Swansea
John Piper – Bethesda Chapel, 1966. (Editioned Print)
John Piper – Bethesda Chapel, Swansea.
John Piper – The Duck House in the Park of Buckland House, 1940. (Painted for Recording Britain)
John Piper – Folly at Buckland, near Faringdon, formerly in Berkshire.
† John Piper and the RIBA Library Photographs Collection by Robert Elwall, 2009.
‡ John Piper by John Russell, Tate Gallery, 1983. p77
Bartlow is one of two churches in Cambridgeshire with a round tower, the village is on the edge of a county border with Essex, so these boundaries have fluctuated over the past hundred years between Cambridgeshire and Essex. It’s listed in the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments book of Essex, 1911 and in the 2014 Pevsner guide as Cambridgeshire.
Churches with round towers are almost exclusive to East Anglia, especially Norfolk and Suffolk. The other church in Cambridgeshire with a round tower is Snailwell and that is on the border of Suffolk and likely was once part of Suffolk too. Why these churches where built with round towers is a mystery; there was once the suggestion it was to be a defence against Viking raiders, but many of the churches where built long after the age of the Vikings.
Below are two strange pieces of graveyard furniture. One is a Greek omphalos decorated in a Georgian style, and below it a rather beautiful, tall, grave marker cast in metal.
The In spite of the belief that Bartlow church was built by King Cnut near the site of the battle of Ashingdon (Assandun) in the early 11th century, no documentary references to the church have been found earlier than the 13th century, and the building dates from the late 11th or early 12th. †
Inside the church, the stained glass windows seam to have a jumbled amount of completion.The tops of the windows however are almost all complete and feature these Lions.
The Lions faces to me are comic and fun. I am unsure whom they are depicting. They are designed like a burning sun, but the representation is likely to be God even though it could be more abstract than that, it could be Richard I, or the reigning monarch or the country’s spirit. They are usually represented either side of a Saint or Jesus portrait.
Above is the shadow of George and the Dragon, though only the base paint of the dragon remain with a few details of flowers and crosses. With the wave of puritanical iconoclasm during the sixteenth century, all the beautiful paintings and details of churches where whitewashed over. Today with luck and careful restoration these are being uncovered. Below on the opposite wall of the church is a better preserved wall painting.
Saint Christopher Carrying the Christ Child
Saint Christopher was a man of great size and strength who devoted himself to Jesus by helping travellers cross a dangerous river. One day a child asked to ride on Christopher’s shoulders across the river, but the infant seemed to grow heavier and heavier with every step. When they arrived on the opposite shore, the child identified himself as Christ, telling the holy man that he had just carried the weight of the world. Saint Christopher became one of the most popular patron saints for travellers in the Middle Ages.
I would guess the organ is a restoration project as it is highly decorated all over, from the ornamental pipes at the front to the boxing holding the mechanism.
An angel blows the wind at the base of a wall plaque.
To the rear of the church is the rest of the graveyard and the way to the roman hill burials. Below is a picture of the wall sundial and the carving and wall painting from it.
† A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 6.
The Churches in Cambridgeshire are some of the least documented in Britain. Cambridgeshire really gets thrown into a void and all the books about the region focus upon the City and the university or Ely; Sometimes the National Trust’s properties like Wicken Fen and Wimpole Hall will also get a mention but there is little else documented on them, outside of pamphlets or the impenetrable Pevsner.
These are the wooden hand carved and probably medieval pew ends of Swavesey Church in Cambridgeshire. Below is a photograph of fourteen of them in a line but there are around fifty carvings in the church itself.
Listed as ‘Suauesye’ in the Domesday Book, the name Swavesey means “landing place (or island) of a man named Swaef”, it was on the edge of the un-drained fens and so it would have been a marsh landscape of islands.
A castle was built here in the late 11th or early 12th century, though is believed to have been derelict by 1200. Swavesey served as a port and subsequent market town and was fortified at the end of the 12th century.It had a port area dug into the centre of the village too. With the draining of the fens the only evidence of this a network of ditches. The draining of the fens bought fields and arable wealth to the town.
The present parish church in Swavesey, dedicated to St Andrew since the 11th century, has a double aisle aspect to its nave. The east window in the Lady Chapel contains a 1967 Tree of Jesse by Francis Skeat.
I got the train to King’s Lynn with my bike, (it’s wonderful how some of the railway companies embrace non-rush-hour cycle travel). From London it is just under two hours. The aim was to get to Babingley to see a Norfolk ruined church that John Piper painted. It is located in the middle of a field.
“Said to be the place where St Felix landed about 636 from Burgundy and thus where Christianity entered East Anglia. The present church is not older than the C14. Like so many others in this part of Norfolk, it is ruinous. The walls stand, but the roofs are gone. It was repaired in 1849 but after the mission church was build in 1880 by the main road there was no use for it.” †
Here is a quote from a book on villages about Sandringham that gives light to the problem many of the rural estate churches had in Norfolk and singles out St Felix’s.
“By the time the future Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, acquired the estate in 1862, it had fallen into ruin. Besides, like many Norfolk churches, it stood by itself among fields, the village having migrated to the main road.
‘Up to the last year of his life he was continually improving his domain, repairing churches, spending money on the place in one way or another,’ a friend remembered of Edward VII after his death in 1910.” ‡
The roof of the church has been removed and few of the other internal details remain that are not part of the structure. The windows are all empty of both glass and the masonry. The church was once one long nave but due to the dwindling congregation the centre of the church was bricked up with a window, to make it two rooms and a bell tower.
John Piper – Babingley Church, 1983.
The screen-print of the church was produced in 1983. It was printed in both colour (1983) and sepia (1984) editions. Below are more images from walking around the church.
The church today is protected by a sea of stinging nettles (urtica dioica) and many signs telling of ‘Danger’. The heras fencing over the doorways and windows with the health and safety signs make it look depressing, even in a ruin we, the public, must be protected.
Above, is an image of some of the dead creepers on the wall coming out of the window, it looks haunted, like a Rackham illustration. Below, a picture of my bike and the fields next to the church.
On cycling from St Felix’s Church I passed St Felix’s Chapel. It’s a strange building of corrugated iron and thatched roof with traditional window frames in.
“The church of St Mary and St Felix at Babingley shows that corrugated iron can also have charm. It stands on the Sandringham estate.” ‡
The cycle ride back towards Kings Lynn took me back through Castle Rising. There is a cycle path going on the edge of the village down a tree lined avenue and over a river where I saw a swan and her signets. The bridge over the river had been graffitied with the words ‘Hustlers Ambition’.
Castle Rising is a small village with the castle still, more-or-less in tact. However I didn’t have much time to see it but the photos from the village were of a rather practical war memorial in the form of a lamp post (maybe an eternal light/flame?) for the First World War. The other was an old sign post for the castle.
With some time to spare before my train home I cycled around the old docklands of King’s Lynn. It was surprising to see so many scuttled boats at low tide.
Below are some Seagull chicks with their enormous feet.
One of the roads by the docks is made up from millions of used shells from the near-by sea food factory. The image below shows how the lorries driving up and down turn the shells into a gravel.
To celebrate the connections with the local R.A.F. Marham over the last 100 years, 15 sponsored and uniquely decorated model Tornados have been positioned around the town. Below is the one outside of the station.
Norfolk by John Betjeman ≠
How did the Devil come? When first attack?
These Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence,
The years fall off and find me walking back
Dragging a stick along the wooden fence
Down this same path, where, forty years ago,
My father strolled behind me, calm and slow.
I used to fill my hands with sorrel seeds
And shower him with them from the tops of the stiles,
I used to butt my head into his tweeds
To make him hurry down those languorous miles
Of ash and alder-shaded lanes, till here
Our moorings and the masthead would appear.
There after supper lit by lantern light
Warm in the cabin I could lie secure
And hear against the polished sides at night
The lap lap lapping of the weedy Bure,
A whispering and watery Norfolk sound
Telling of all the moonlit reeds around.
How did the Devil come? When first attack?
The church is just the same, though now I know
Fowler of Louth restored it. Time, bring back
The rapturous ignorance of long ago,
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.
† Norfolk 2: North-West and South, Part 2. p190 9780300096576
‡ Villages of Britain. 9780747588726
≠ John Betjeman’s collected poems – p210 9780719568503
