St Andrew, Langford, Norfolk This church is within the Norfolk Battle Training Area. Access to this zone by the general public is forbidden. Langford: If you didn't know, you would never guess. Although Langford church is within the battle training area, its surroundings are so familiar that you would think it just another lonely East Anglian church. Norfolk and Suffolk have dozens of little churches with settings like this. Standing the narrow track with a field of barley on the right, only the barbed wire topped fence around the church suggested to me that something was strange. Not far off, melting mounds of Norfolk clunch tell you that there was a village here once; but it was never other than tiny. St Andrew is also not very big. It is the smallest of the churches in the training area, a simple two-celled Norman building which once had a medieval tower, but lost it in the 18th century. The west wall that replaced it is made of stone, which looks curious in this heartland of flint. The bell turret is late Victorian, but has Norman detailing that was intended to fit in. In truth, anything here that is not understated is out of place, as we shall see inside. Before that, I saw on both sides a fine 15th century window beside a blocked Norman lancet; and there are curious faces up in the eaves of the nave east end, a grinning cat to the south, a wild man to the north. He reminded me of the ones on the sedilia at nearby Thompson. A kestrel nests most years in the porch. A grand Norman doorway leads into a simple open space, now completely cleared of everything except for the font, and, up in the chancel, the outrageously grand 18th century Garrard memorial. It is wholly pagan, the three figures (grand-father, father and son) dressed in Roman togas and striking attitudes of rational calm. No awe and wonder here. And although it does overpower the place most unfortunately, there is also a sense in which it seems tucked away against the north chancel wall, as if it were sulking there, and so it should. Eversons and more Garrards are remembered by ledger stones. This was the closest church to the great hall at Buckenham Tofts, but most residents prefered to be remembered at the grander church at West Tofts. The west window bears scars of a time when the training area was less controlled than it is today. Stepping outside, there are very few headstones in the graveyard in comparision with the other three training area churches; but in places in the grass I came across little pools of flat stone denoting a memorial almost hidden now by overgrowth, soon to be lost forever. Ghosts of ghosts... The Norfolk Battle Training Area: On Ordnance Survey maps the Norfolk Battle Training Area appears as a patch of white mist, like a ghost among the green forests and winding Norfolk lanes. Roads that enter the zone become tracks and multiply, as if this is still the 19th century, and the land is still measured by walking across it rather driving through it. Leaving the area, the tracks disappear or merge into busy modern roads. For a moment, they had been lost in time. But the lanes must travel through the time warp alone, for this strange area of Breckland (God knows, a curious enough landscape in itself) has been used by the British Army for the last sixty years as a battle training area. As this involves the firing of live ammunition, nobody lives in the zone, and the six former villages there have been able to softly and silently vanish. The soft Norfolk clunch out of which many of the buildings were made has melted into the ground, leaving mounds of flint, chimney stacks and the occasional cellar. Some buildings have been demolished, others adapted for training purposes. Plaques mark the locations of formerly significant buildings: the pubs, the schools, the post offices, the village halls. Very little remains, with the singular exception of the churches. All six villages had churches. Those at Buckenham Tofts and Sturton were abandoned in the years after the Reformation, and by the 18th century very little remained. The lost graveyard of St Andrew, Buckenham Tofts, was rediscovered when the pleasure gardens for the Hall were laid out in the early years of the 20th century. The site of St Mary, Sturton, was marked until recent years by an area of flint beside the Hall. The other four villages, Langford, Stanford, Tottington and West Tofts, all had working churches when the zone was evacuated in 1944. St Andrew Tottington is a typical East Anglian church, rebuilt from the wealth of this area in the 14th and 15th centuries with the addition of aisles and a clerestory. All Saints Stanford is typically East Anglian in a different way, with a round tower and a high nave hunched against it. Both were heavily restored by the Victorians, Stanford excessively so, in a naive but enthusiastic manner by the Rector of the time. St Andrew at Langford is lovely, a soft little towerless Norman church with

Langford Colour IR