"...I saw the head of an angel."
Annoyance, determination, and hard work can bring unexpected rewards.
We were holidaying in Norfolk, combining family history research with exploring picturesque English villages. Each morning we left our base, we passed a small pointer sign announcing “Ancient Church”. I’d looked at the map, but nothing historical was marked. In fact there wasn’t a village marked. A thin unclassified road seemed to lead nowhere in particular. Close to the end of our holiday, we decided to take a look.
The narrow rural lane led between rolling fields bordered by high hedges. Abruptly on a bend we came upon a gravel parking bay, and the same small sign. This time it was pointing to an even narrower route of crushed brick up the side of a steeply sloping field towards a clump of trees.
Like pilgrims, we walked the uneven route, and passed through the gate into the garden-like graveyard of St Mary the Virgin, Houghton-on-the-Hill. Its story proved awesome.
On their retirement, Bob and Gloria Davey moved to a nearby village for the quiet rural life. At least, they tried for a quiet rural life. They joined the congregation of the local church where Bob became a bell-ringer and churchwarden. Gloria embraced the community spirit and explored the surrounding countryside with a rambling group.
It was in 1992, while enjoying such an excursion, that through an overgrown hedge Gloria saw the shape of a church tower covered in ivy. Out of briars and waist-high nettle-beds, headstones peeped. A church from a lost medieval village, perhaps? She was closer than she knew.
Out of curiosity, she followed an animal track which, oddly, led to a broken door. Squeezing inside, she found the reason for the human track: the roofless ruin was being used by satanists, even to the extent of desecrating the grave of an 18th century rector interred in the nave. Once home, she informed her husband.
Bob Davey was outraged. Impelled to stop such sacrilege, he was appalled when the Church of England authorities did not agree, despite the derelict property remaining consecrated ground.
Faced with the Church’s apathy and lack of help from other quarters, Bob took matters into his own hands. He organised a service of purification for the body of the church, and he and Gloria began clearing the graveyard of briars.
The satanists, however, were not to be dissuaded. Bob Davey stood his ground, even to guarding the church alone overnight when they were expected. They, in turn, made a visit to his home to warn him off by showing they knew where he lived. On another occasion he was involved in a near-miss ‘accident’.
A pensioner, Bob Davey wasn’t a tall, robust man, but he had the determination of an Old Testament prophet, and a white beard to match. No one was going to deter him.
Word spread. It was agreed that members of the local Territorial Army might use the churchyard for a ‘camouflage exercise’, choosing a known date. The satanists did not return.
It was with the TA’s help that the roots were cut to the ivy covering the tower, and the inside of the church cleared of debris. Bob then started fund-raising to have the nave re-roofed, sinking much of his and Gloria’s retirement savings into the project.
As he later explained, ‘Put your own money in, and people start taking notice’.
However, a lack of vehicular access was hampering efforts. Bob immersed himself in research. By law, a consecrated site could not be denied access. So he built one of crushed concrete, uphill, along the edge of the adjoining field, using a wheelbarrow and shovel – the one we’d walked along. It took him three months. He later told an interviewer that it was seven-eighths of a mile. I believe him.
Bob’s resolute attitude gained him volunteers, and four years after first visiting the dilapidated site, The Friends of St Mary’s was formed. With the ivy gone, a new pantile roof on the nave, and money being raised for replacement windows, cleaning work could start on the inside.
The decaying plaster walls were covered in a green sludge-like mould, which had to be scrubbed clean to view the extent of the damage. When a piece of plaster fell away, as Bob put it, ‘...the first thing I saw was the head of an angel’.
Until the religious Reformation of the 16th century, the plastered walls of British churches were used as instructional tools by depicting stories from the Bible. Seen in the flickering flames of rushlights and candles, they added weight to sermons and the rituals of the Church for a largely illiterate congregation. Upon the Reformation, when the country shifted from Catholicism to Protestantism, most church walls were limewashed, which would not have protected the paintings from the elements.
At St Mary’s the walls had been replastered, at least twice, hence the uniform holes used as a key to bond the new plaster to the old. Bob had seen a fragment of a medieval wall painting. Beneath the top greened layer of plaster, the layer that covered the angel was found to hold large-scale post-Reformation texts dating from the Elizabethan period, which the then largely literate congregation could read.
Volunteer work on the church stopped immediately as the authorities finally took notice. A lottery grant was secured and conservation experts came to work on the plaster. Beneath the Elizabethan texts, and wall paintings from the 14th, 13th and 12th centuries – five layers in all – are believed to be the oldest Romanesque wall paintings in Britain, dating from the Saxon-Norman period of the 10th and 11th centuries.
Spread across the wall leading to the chancel is a depiction of the Last Judgement. The Holy Trinity is within a triple mandorla, with God enthroned holding the crucified Christ, and a dove denoting the Holy Spirit. To God’s right, the viewer’s left, the blessed rise naked from their graves on a trumpet call from an archangel. To God’s left, the viewer’s right, the damned are ushered down to Hell. The colours, now faded to pastel, would have been vivid at the time of application.
As work progressed, more paintings came to light on other walls: God creating Eve from Adam in the Garden of Eden; Noah’s Ark, looking less the accepted shape we recognise and more like a Viking longship; and the Wheel of Life. There may be more, but to find them would destroy others. Perhaps in time technology may offer the answer.
More important to Bob, the church returned to Christian worship. As a Chapel of Ease it now welcomes all denominations. Both church and its serene cemetery garden are cared for by volunteers.
The Church of St Mary the Virgin slowly revealed its lineage. A search of manuscripts proved that a wooden church had been on the site in 639AD. The 8th century cobble-built nave was found to incorporate tiles and dressed stone from a Roman villa discovered by archaeologists in the valley below. This incarnation of the church had a rounded apse behind its altar, now marked in cobbles in the grass. Its round Saxon tower was replaced in the 14th century with the more fashionable square tower seen today.
Despite its church, Houghton-on-the-Hill had never been a large village and, as the centuries passed, the congregation dwindled. There were only two marriages in the 1920s, a single christening in the 1930s. The last service was probably in 1944 for USAAF servicemen stationed at a nearby airfield who used the tower as a sighting point back to base.
When the final cottage was demolished, leaving only a nearby farm, the Diocese scheduled the building for deconsecration and demolition. And thankfully forgot about it.
Gloria Davey died in 2006; Robert Davey MBE followed in March 2021, aged 91 years. Their ashes are buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Houghton-on-the-Hill.
Little did Bob realise when he began to cut through the undergrowth to reveal the building, that he and Gloria would give so many years to its preservation, or be rewarded for their persistence and determination in such historic fashion.
But, as he once observed when interviewed, “You’ve got to do something when you retire. You can’t just sit about or play golf.”
A couple I would have loved to meet.
Sources:
Personal visit, Bob Davey’s video guide, website of Friends of St Mary the Virgin
Various news reports, Wikipaedia, and other webpages.
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Regards - Linda Acaster
Portals to the Past