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St
Margaret, Hopton
'Old
St Margaret'
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I am a big fan of those
characterful old Victorian tortoise stoves which
you still see in some medieval churches,
especially rural ones where the thought police
from the Health and Safety Executive haven't
dared venture yet. However, they can occasionally
cause problems, and this church is a good
illustration of that, because an overheating
stove and chimney caused the thatched roof to
catch fire one day in 1865, and the building was
completely gutted. This church was out in the
fields in those days, and as so often in Norfolk,
the opportunity was taken to rebuild closer to
the centre of population. The new
church of St Margaret is now in the High Street. In those days, Hopton was a fairly
remote Suffolk village of barely 250 souls, but
today it has grown into a suburb of Great
Yarmouth, although it must be said that the area
around this ruin is a reasonably pleasant housing
estate. In 1974, the borders were redrawn, and
Hopton was moved into Norfolk along with the rest
of Yarmouth's urban sprawl.
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The ruin
is set in a public park, which makes it sound rather
jolly, but I am afraid that it is not the kind of park
you would want to spend very much time in, if the vodka
bottle lying to the east of the ruin was anything to go
by. And the ruin is, in any case, completely inaccessible
behind a high wire fence, and overgrown with ivy which is
climbing steadily and tenaciously up the tower to bring
the whole lot down.
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must have been a big church, with a wide south
aisle which appears to have extended into the
chancel as well. I had hoped to find somewhere
like Stanton St John, where the
lawns inside the nave are neatly clipped and you
can wander at will, but this ruin is in a
dangerous condition, and features on Norfolk
County Council's Buildings at Risk
register. The council have been exemplary in many
parts of Norfolk in restoring ruins to a safe
state and opening them up to the public, but I
think they would have their work cut out here. I
am sure that the ruin would be a pleasant
adornment, and even a historical act of Christian
witness, if it were in the middle of Norwich or
Ipswich, but here we had already found at the new church that the
people of Hopton are not generally trusted by the
church authorities. I wandered
around the perimeter feeling rather glum, until
on the north side I found the gravestones which
had once filled the park, now set out in a stark
row behind the high wire fence. They stared
balefully back at me.
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