Collapsing Churches and Priest Holes – Day One in Norfolk

Sunday 25 August 2019

We woke to a hot, sunny day and decided that we had spent enough time in the car yesterday to not want to repeat the experience today. So we spent the entire day in Oxborough. Rachel, Joseph and David went off to see one of Joseph’s customers from Virgin Money who lived locally. They had apparently been speaking on the phone when she rang his call centre some weeks ago, and he managed to get himself invited to her home after he’d told her that he was going to Oxborough on holiday.

I didn’t fancy that so I went round and had a neb around the church. There wasn’t a great deal of it left, which I had assumed was down to Henry VIII’s soldiers buggering about in the Reformation, but it turned out that it had lost its spire one afternoon in 1948 after it fell under it’s own weight. It was pretty tall and made a right mess of the rest of the building.

There were two Mobbses on the War Memorial from WW1. Its the first and so far only time I’ve ever seen our name on a memorial so I took a photo and sent it to Alan to show him. One of the Mobbses was called Arthur; Alan said that it “was nice to see the dog got a mention.”

There was also a “fun” day on the village green but it was really just a dog show and a car boot. I wandered around it a bit with my camera. This turned out to be a mistake as a) there was nothing to take a photo of, and b) one bloke thought I was the official photographer. It’s the size of the lens that does it. I went and sat on the bench, in the heat, and listened on my earpieces to Ben Stokes destroy the Australians.

In the afternoon we all went to Oxborough Hall, a National Trust-owned mansion and gardens.

The sunshine brought out the colours in the garden, although they were just past their best now. Whether that’s because of the heat, or the fact that Autumn is only a few days away, I don’t know. But they were seriously impressive. For me the highlight of the visit was the priest hole. They had to go up some stairs, then down under the floor which opened up into a little room. The entrance was just about big enough for a child so I decided not to risk the embarrassment of getting stuck in it, and looked at the video in the next room instead. Apparently the soldiers could turn up at a moment’s notice and stay for days, turning the place over until they were satisfied. A bit like the OFSTED of the 16th Century, but with swords.

Nicholas Owen was the guy who designed and built 200 priest holes all over the country at the height of the Reformation. He was eventually arrested and tortured, taking ten days to die on the rack in the Tower of London. He never revealed the location of any of the holes though, and was later canonised for his trouble. So not really like OFSTED at all.

In the evening we had a roast at the Bedingfeld Arms, 150 yards down the road from the cottage. We have long been those people who feel that Sunday isn’t Sunday without a roast dinner.