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Despite my comments about St. Edmund’s church, Downham Market in the previous blog I have to admit that I have never been inside. Ely and Norwich diocese are much better at encouraging parochial church councils to make arrangements for the access into churches than they use to be, often with a nominated key-keeper living nearby with […]

The town of Downham Market stands astride the scarp slope of the East Anglian Heights (as does Caistor in Lincolnshire) with St Edmund’s church sited at the highest point. As the scarp slope overlooks the level Fens to the west as far as the eye can see the church forms a prominent landmark and, even without

With being brought-up in south-west Norfolk, in and around the village of Boughton seven miles east of Downham Market (see above map) and with often cycling around that area I suppose I became faintly ‘landscape aware’ at an early age. The above map taken from The Norfolk Landscape (s.p.b.), p. 29 shows that the immediate

In his book The Norfolk Landscape David Dymond writes (Alastair Press, 1990,25) ‘Laid down in a Cretaceous sea between 135 and 70 million years ago, the chalk consists primarily of the remains of once living organisms such as algae and foraminifera. It accumulated slowly, probably at the rate of one foot in 30,000 years. In

Chalk is the most available building stone in north Lincolnshire. In the example shown above (some surviving old farm buildings in Barton parish) squared blocks of chalk laid in courses and bonded by lime mortar have survived intact, while nearby chalk rubble has been used in another part of the wall not coursed and bonded

The picture above shows one of my most prized possessions found 30 years ago in long grass on the site of what was, until the Reformation, a large Cistercian monastic complex at Meaux on the eastern edge of the River Hull valley, east of Beverley (technically then a stolen artefact!). This block of carved chalk rock