Salle

'There's this gigantic church in the middle of nowhere, I vaguely remember visiting it', said Alec from the LGMG once. I was fairly sure this was Salle - eccentrically pronounced 'Saul' - which coincidentally enough is one of the handful of churches now looked after by a former curate from Swanvale Halt, translated to darkest Norfolk a few years ago. So while I was on holiday I went looking for it. You glimpse the place as you approach along the lanes, but then with the gently undulating landscape and the intervention of trees it disappears until you turn the corner and are right on top of it.

The little guide leaflet (an earlier full-scale booklet is no longer available) very accurately predicts the visitor's first reaction by asking with its initial words 'Why so big?' This church is colossal. It may not be quite as huge as some of the Norfolk buildings I mentioned in previous posts, but the contrast with the empty space around it, shared merely with an old Victorian schoolhouse and a cottage or two, and the vacancy of the space within, make it seem even bigger. The answer to the leaflet's question is either the long one provided by Simon Knott in a wonderful introduction or the short one, that it was built by a consortium of medieval aristocrats who wanted a bigger church than Cawston, the next door parish. The regular congregation nowadays is about seven, but the truth is that this building wasn't constructed with the needs of a congregation in mind: it was a space for guilds and chantries, and a demonstration of the wealth and power of its founders.

The church was in a state of thorough disrepair by the end of the 19th century but benefited from a very restrained and antiquarian-minded restoration thereafter which left the building with the minimum of addition and amendment, mainly the windows (including St Catherine with her fancy hat) in the north transept and a couple of bells. Nothing has been repainted, recarved, replaced, or otherwise tarted up, and the woodwork and stonework have a strangely bleached quality which only increases the sense of age and space. October has been mild this year, but with no heating of any kind I imagine the church gets challengingly cold as winter draws in.

The Norfolk churches site has far more comprehensive photographs of Salle than I could take, and mine here do no more than give a flavour of this awesomely grand, spare building.

There is even a copy of a map of the church glebe which shows a field immediately west of the church by the name of Well Pightle - so there may have been a holy well here once.