Postcard from Norfolk: the churches marooned behind army lines

In 1942, the British army gave 700 inhabitants of six Norfolk villages scattered across the sandy heathland north of Thetford just three weeks to leave. It then created a 50 square mile training ground where soldiers prepared for the invasion of Europe two years later.

The assumption was that the villagers would return after the second world war. They never did. To this day, maps show the Stanford Training Area, or Stanta, as a large blank space that the public may not enter except on occasional guided tours such as the one I recently joined. Organised by the Norfolk Churches Trust, it took us to the last remnants of those lost villages — four hardy stone churches.

We gathered at West Tofts Camp, the army’s main base at Stanta, one Friday afternoon. Our army escort warned we might hear gunfire but it would not be live ammunition because it was lambing season. Do not pick up suspicious-looking objects, he added. Do not wander away. Do not photograph soldiers or their kit.

With that, we climbed into a coach, drove through Gate One, and returned to the 1940s via unmarked country lanes. We meandered across gorse-covered heaths and through dappled birch woods, over wild streams and rivers where otters play, past gorgeous unspoilt countryside populated only by rabbits, sheep and deer.

There are no soldiers in sight. There are no road signs here, no street lights or petrol stations, no buildings save occasional military sangars, watchtowers and distinctly incongruous portable toilets. The old cottages and pubs, schools and shops, were mostly made of clay and Norfolk clunch, a soft chalky limestone, and eight decades on few traces of them remain. Only a few grassy mounds and the odd plinth mark where they once stood.

Of the village of West Tofts, all that remains is a fine avenue of lime trees leading through the parkland of an old estate to a medieval church that Augustus Welby Pugin transformed into a splendid Gothic place of worship in the late 19th century.

Tottington church was where Stanta’s inhabitants gathered to be told of their evacuation 80 years ago. Today, it is little more than a shell

Outside, the church is ringed by a high metal fence, topped with barbed wire and signed: “Out of bounds to troops.” Inside, it is in surprisingly good order, with its pews, choir stall, rood screen, pulpit, stained-glass windows, carved stone altar and wall paintings all intact. Pre-Covid, the army organised a carol service here each Christmas for those with links to the commandeered villages. Occasionally former villagers or their descendants are interred in the graveyard, which remains consecrated ground.

Next, we walk 300 yards up a dirt track to the round-towered All Saints church on the edge of what was once the village of Stanford but is now a firing range. The exterior is in good shape because the Ministry of Defence was for a long time obliged to maintain the “fabric” of the churches under an agreement the War Department reached with the Bishop of Norwich in 1950. The musty interior is empty save for scaffolding propping up the roof. The plaster walls are crumbling. Ivy curls in through broken stained glass windows.

We drive on to the towerless Norman church of St Andrew, a lonely but lovely edifice that once served the tiny, long-vanished village of Langford. The interior is bare except for a magnificently ornate baroque marble monument to a family of 18th-century aristocrats, the Garrards.

The lane to the fourth church takes us down Stanta’s eastern flank. We see in the distance what appears to be a Middle Eastern settlement of low mud houses. This is Eastmere, built and adapted over the years to train soldiers for conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. At one stage, the Ministry of Defence used Afghan actors to pose as residents. (Stanta was also used to film various scenes for the British TV series Dad’s Army).

Tottington is the final — and most poignant — stop on our three-hour tour. Being the largest village, its church was where Stanta’s inhabitants gathered to be told of their evacuation 80 years ago. Today, the building is little more than a shell. The windows are mostly glassless and gaping. The carved pews are piled together and covered in bird droppings. Many of the floor tiles have vanished. An ancient wooden pulpit, with a faded red velvet cloth still hanging from its front, stands haphazardly on a bed of sand. A desiccated bat lies on the ground. “Keep out — collapsed wallpost,” says a sign in one corner.

Outside, in perfect silence except for birdsong, stand the neglected, overgrown graves of the long-forgotten inhabitants of Tottington. Of their descendants evacuated in 1942, few can still be alive. Still fewer — if any — would remember life here in rural prewar Norfolk.

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