This could well be the most famous church in Norfolk. It is certainly the best-documented on the internet, and as I was here in pre-digital days and took a relatively small number of photos with an inferior camera, I am very hesitant about putting this entry up at all. Treat it, then, as an introduction, and explore the links at the end of the entry. When I have revisited I will fully update this page with lots of lovely digital photographs. When Arthur Mee came this way in the late 1930s, St Mary was a small, almost derelict church on a bald hill above the road between South and North Pickenham. It had suffered damage in the First World War when a returning Zeppelin dumped its bombs into the churchyard. He found the chancel ruinous and the top of the tower open to the sky. There was a cottage beside it, and a farmhouse across a field. The last baptism had been in 1933, the last wedding eight years earlier.

Within ten years, these had both gone, as the whole of England came under intense cultivation, and St Mary found itself a parish with no inhabitants at all. With no proper road leading to the hamlet, and in an area severely curtailed by the presence of American Air Forces, it was abandoned. After the war, thickets of trees and brambles reclaimed the hillside, and this was just another lost Norfolk church, one of many.

The story goes that in the hot summer of 1992, members of North Pickenham WI were on a ramble in these hills when they stopped for a rest on the edge of the graveyard of St Mary's. One of the number, a woman called Gloria Davey, was intrigued by gravestones among the thickets, and cleared a path into the churchyard itself. There, she found St Mary a ruin, all the roofs now gone, and the entire shell encased in ivy. She climbed in, and was horrified to discover what she called 'signs of Satanic worship'. When she got home, she told her husband, Pickenham churchwarden Bob Davey. The next day, he went and took a look, and decided to organise a series of watches to deter night time visitors. More significantly, he got onto Norfolk County Council and ensured that St Mary was added to the 'Buildings at Risk' register, an important step to setting in motion a process of repair, and attracting funding. The county, we may assume, were relieved to find a local with so much interest and energy, and were happy to agree.

Over the next ten years, Bob Davey spent every waking moment bringing St Mary back from the dead. He cleared the graveyard, made the floors safe and cleared all the rubble from the site. Norfolk Archeological Service became interested, and when an architect came to look he felt it would be possible to rebuild a roof on the old timbers rather than building an entirely new one. By now, Bob had already organised open-air services in the empty shell, but the addition of a roof meant it was worth doing something about the walls.

This was when something extraordinary happened. Under the crumbly Victorian plaster were found painted texts from Elizabethan times - and under them, a vast array of wall paintings from the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries. And under them, amazing things; for here, on this quiet little hilltop, is one of the best sequences of Saxon wall-paintings in western Europe. Immediately, the big guns came in - the Courtauld Institute, English Heritage, other national heritage and archaeological organisations, and, most important of all, funding bodies.

The most significant painting is that over the moorish chancel arch, which depicts the Trinity as part of a last judgement. It is believed to be the earliest representation of the Trinity in this form. Incredibly, pigments used include cinnabar, perhaps the most expensive of all at the time. How on earth did it end up being used here? All around are arrays of apostles and angels, a glorious Holy Mother of God, the Saints of heaven in all their glory. For a moment, modern nations fall away, and we are anywhere in Europe or north Africa at the dawn of the second millennium.

Work still continues apace, both on interpreting and preserving the wall paintings, and on gradually replacing the windows, which were repaired urgently and temporarily early on. Bob Davey traced the former font to a garden in a nearby village, and brought it back. One of the two bells (the other is now at Swaffham) sits on the nave floor, awaiting the day when it can be rehung. The satanists came back in the late 1990s (or perhaps it was merely vandals) and destroyed the ledger stone grave to Robert Say in the middle of the nave, removing his bones. This has now been repaired with cement, but perhaps needs to be left cracked and broken as a reminder to us all of how vulnerable these places can become if we neglect them.

He spends part of most days up here, has converted the churchyard into a garden, and oversees everything that happens. Visitors come from all over the world, and one of the weblinks below is an account of a recent visit by Prince Charles. If you come here, Bob Davey will show you around with as much enthusiasm and interest as he did the Prince of Wales, because he loves this building, and he's that kind of bloke. Simon Knott, November 2004

Contact Bob Davey to arrange a visit on 01760 440470

Some useful links:

Generally recommended:
The church website
East Anglia webguide entry for Houghton

Other sites of interest:
Friends of St Mary's (fundraising)
Paddy Apling's site (genealogical)
Painted Church - a guide to the wallpaintings
Churchcrawler - another account of this visit!

you can also read an introduction: Ancient of Days