Remnants Of Past Glories

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the idea of the seaside had never caught on? How about if people never came with buckets and spades, or wealthy city folk didn't come to live in the country? What if the countryside had just been left unchanged for the last century or two? Come and take a stroll around Waxham, it might be as near as you ever get to an un-tampered-with coastal village.

This is the Hall, nowadays a rather over-sized farmhouse, but once home to the wealthy Woodhouse and Calthorpe dynasties. It dates from about 1570 and still retains the grandeur of a garden wall with octagonal corner turrets. There's even a gatehouse, but the opening is blocked up and the whole is submerged beneath a dense blanket of ivy.

Some of the once state-of-the-art farm buildings have also deteriorated considerably. That's how much of East Anglia might have looked after one of the periodic agricultural slumps.

But what is that rather grand gable-end seen behind the old tractor?

At around the same time that they were building the Hall, Sir Henry Woodhouse decided he needed a big barn - that's one end of it in the photo above. And when he said "big" he meant BIG. It's 178 feet long (54 metres) with flint walls and a thatched roof. It was built just after the Dissolution of the Monasteries and may well contain materials salvaged from these religious buildings - one of those buttresses seen above looks like it might come from there.

It's the biggest ancient barn in East Anglia and was probably built as a "vanity project" meant to compete with (and ruthlessly defeat) barns built by other landowners in the district. But he also had reason to invest in such a huge structure; his family had become wealthy by supplying food for the army and navy. However Sir Henry liked spending money so much that he "utterly consumed the estate" and his son had to rebuild the family fortune from scratch.

By the 1990s the wealthy families had long left the scene, the barn was in desperate need of repair and was purchased by the county council who restored it. You can clearly see where some of the beams have been replaced. The barn is now used as a venue for weddings, but is open for public perusal at all other times. One of the associated buildings now houses a café. There were several people sitting outside the café, but no one else took the opportunity to take a look inside this Grade I listed building. Sad.

Tucked away in a dusty corner of the barn, with no explanatory notice, was this elderly piece of equipment which, unless I'm greatly mistaken, is a hand-turned quern of the type used in farmhouse kitchens for grinding flour.

Time to step outside again and continue our stroll around this tiny village.

This end of the barn is walled off internally from the rest of the building and I suspect it may have been used as a granary. Those slits in the gable wall are to allow air to circulate and the central round holes are to let owls enter and leave; they were vital for vermin control in old barns.

St John's Church dates in part from the twelfth century, but has been patched up and added to, with varying degrees of success, over the years. Photos I've seen online show a nicely dilapidated interior which hasn't been ruined by the heavy-handed restoration of the Victorian era. Unfortunately the building was locked - perhaps they open it in summer when more people are about.

This ivy-clad, or perhaps we should say "ivy-swamped", chunk of wall is all that remains of the church's chancel. It's been unused for centuries and you can still clearly see how the chancel-arch has been infilled.

Gorse is becoming a recurring theme in this blog lately, and it shone brightly against the cold grey stone of the church tower.

What else is there to see? Well, just a handful of houses scattered around an irregular quadrangle of narrow roads. In high summer these roads get clogged up with parked cars - people have discovered that they can park here for free and find their way down to an uncommercialised stretch of beach.

Oh, and you can buy half-a-dozen eggs, just pop your money in the honesty box.

Take care.