Saturday, July 28, 2007

Churches in Cromer

Cromer has a large church in the centre of town, which didn’t initially strike me as very interesting. However, once you’d checked out the information around the walls and saw the pictures of past events, you realised that it suffered considerable damage in the last War, with windows being blown out, and sections of it being badly damaged. This will account for it not having so many unusual features. The church in Upper Sheringham turned out to have interested carvings on the ends of the pews; not animals this time, but a series of strange designs that almost looked like knights, some with hollow eyes. The front five rows or so, however, had additional features: beside the main designs were other individual designs such as a woman lying wrapped on her side, strange mythical creatures and so on.
And continuing on about churches, we went and checked out the Beeston Regis church, which is halfway between West Runton and Sheringham. It’s up on a hill, overlooks the sea and a large caravan park, and is in good condition. Celia couldn’t remember ever having been in there, and thought there should be a more ruined building there. That turned out to be the Priory which is further along the road towards Sheringham. The Beeston Regis church however did have a series of very old paintings on the rood (that sort of divider that separates the congregation from the altar area). Apparently they’ve been touched up at various times, but the paintings themselves are what the artists conceived centuries ago. It seems that if you don’t skimp your visit to churches you’ll find something special about each one.

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