On the edge of the Norfolk battle training area, stuck away in the woods, is the tiny Catholic church of Our Lady of Consolation and St Stephen. It was built by the fabulously wealthy Mrs Lyne-Stephens in 1878. She lived at Lynford Hall, and, as Pevsner puts it, 'tired of travelling into Thetford' for Mass.

She is most famous for bank-rolling the vast Our Lady and the English Martyrs in central Cambridge, which many tourists mistake for a cathedral, but Our Lady and St Stephen was her private chapel. Although the architect was Henry Clutton, it was built at the time Pugin was working on the nearby West Tofts parish church; the altar and reredos here are by Pugin, and Pevsner thinks he influenced the rest of the building as well.   Mrs Lyne-Stephens inherited over a million pounds from her husband's estate - this is equivalent to about two hundred million in today's money. But when she died, the estate was bought by an Anglican, who considered the church 'a terrible eyesore', and planted the screens of trees around it to hide it. These, now mature, make the building very difficult to photograph. The adjacent presbytery is now a private house, and the Church is served from Thetford.

Liturgically, all Catholic churches should be open, or at least accessible. In practice in East Anglia, most are not, especially outside the towns. Technically, this is a chapel of ease, not a church, and so the same doesn't apply, but it won't surprise you to learn that we found it locked.

It still hosts the anticipatory Mass every Saturday night, but the Diocese, in its infinite wisdom, is considering mothballing it, so that people travel into Thetford for Mass (the thinking being that Parish communities should not be separated by Mass stations if possible). I'm not sure what local people make of this, but in the Suffolk Catholic parish of Hadleigh, which has three churches, the people are up in arms at suggestions that two of them should be mothballed. As one person pointed out to me, the current Hadleigh congregation can hardly fit into the main church - the addition of 150 more people would result in them standing on the pavements outside. This, however, she concluded with a sigh, appears to be what the Bishop wants.

Simon Knott, July 2004

You can also read: an introduction to churches beyond the battle zone I