If you didn't know, you would never guess. Although Langford church is one of the four churches of the Norfolk Battle Training Area and is not generally accessible by the public, 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 by the narrow track with a field of barley on the right, only the barbed wire topped fence around the church suggests that something is a little odd. Not far off, melting mounds of Norfolk clunch tell you that there was a village here once, but it was never other than tiny.

Lie its former village, 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. At the time of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, the rector of Langford, John Raven, recorded that it had been destroyed by time or accident. 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-style detailing that was intended to fit in. In truth, anything here that is not understated is out of place, as we shall see inside. A 15th century window opens 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. A kestrel nests most years in the porch. And then a grand 12th Century 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.

The three figures appear to be whitewashed, and are wholly pagan, grandfather, father and son dressed in Roman togas and striking attitudes of rational calm. And although it does overpower the place somewhat, 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 of course most residents preferred to be remembered in the grander church of West Tofts. The west window glass has bullet holes in it, scars of a time when the activities of the training area were perhaps less controlled than they are today. Stepping outside, there are very few headstones in the graveyard in comparison with the other three training area churches, but in places in the grass there are little pools of flat stone denoting a memorial almost hidden now by overgrowth, soon to be lost forever. Ghosts of ghosts...

Simon Knott, May 2004, revised December 2022

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an introduction to the churches of the Norfolk battle training area

LANGFORD STANFORD TOTTINGTON WEST TOFTS