All Saints Church, Barmer, Norfolk - a photo on Flickriver

Despite having an Ordnance Survey map in the car I passed Barmer Church twice before I eventually managed to spot it. It is hidden in the trees about three hundred yards east of the main road. There's only a narrow footpath across the fields to the church so I had to park at the next major road junction and then walk up a busy country road with no footpath. All in all, not an easy church to find or to get to. However it was worth it.

www.flickr.com/photos/barryslemmings/sets/72157594337822857/ to see the full set.

No longer in use, All Saints Church, Barmer, is now cared-for by the Norfolk Churches Trust. The small church guide suggests the church is Saxon and the round tower also implies a Saxon origin although no Saxon material can be seen today in the tower but there is some Saxon material in the nave walls. Fragments of pottery found in the field around the church suggest there was a settlement here around the church from the 8th century AD until sometime in the Middle Ages when the village faltered and died. [See also Egmere among my sets for another example of a Norfolk church which has outlived its community]. Barmer Church was neglected and unused in the 17th and 18th centuries.

One of the first things I noticed as I reached the church yard was the round tower and the small size of the building - as the immediate village around the church died, Barmer was never redeveloped in the 15th century so it is a good guide to just how small many medieval village churches must originally have been. Another thing I noticed was its two doors, a typical wooden outer door and an inner iron door of a massive type that would have done justice to a bank vault. This inner door was installed when the church was used for a time as a mausoleum in the 19th century.

The tower walls are nearly five feet thick and the guide says the core may be Saxon. Two lancet windows in the tower are 12th century. Standing at the bottom and looking up you can see all the way up to the tower's flat roof and the one small bronze bell hanging at the side. There are no internal floors in the tower.

The south doorway is also 12th century [Early English] while the heavy iron door was added by the Kerslake family in the 19th century. Following its restoration to a mausoleum, the church was restored again for regular services and the chancel was substantially rebuilt in 1885/6 by Rev E.K. Kerslake, the then patron. The north aisle was also restored but has 14th century [Decorated Period] windows and the north arcade is 14th century. A row of corbels suggest an earlier flat roof, possibly Norman.

The guide says the chancel arch may be Norman but was probably re-modelled to Early English and then refaced by the Victorians.

A separate leaflet from the Round Tower Churches Society says that most round towers are to be found in East Englia with 120 still existing in Norfolk [with the remains of a further 30 visible or recorded] while there are 42 in Suffolk, seven in Essex and two in Cambridgeshire. There are three in Sussex and two in Berkshire. It is generally thought that most round towers are Saxon and were the best design for working with flint rubble as a building material before the Normans introduced the wider use of dressed stone and their characteristic square towers. Barmer is just such a 'flint' church.

Taken on: October 4, 2006

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