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Simon Knott
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Blessed Virgin and child, 1930s, artist unknown
Blessed Virgin and child, 1930s, artist unknown

St Martin, Witcham, Cambridgeshire

From Coveney I headed south for Witcham and Witchford. Oddly, just outside the village the road split pointing to one of the villages in each direction, but I had thought they were both close together to the south. I hadn't brought my OS map with me, and I headed on for a couple of miles only to notice from the sun that I was heading north-west! I reached Wardy Hill, which I'd never heard of, and finally stopped to get out my ipad and look up the OS map on Bing Maps. To my discomfort I discovered that there was no direct route between Coveney and Witcham as I had thought from a previous quick glance at the map - the other road ran down to Wentworth and Witchford, but the road to Witcham went round the houses for about four miles - I should have taken the other road at the fork. Doh. Still, on I went, eventually coming into Witcham, a large village, like so many fen villages with its ugly scrapyards and distribution depots on the outskirts but in the heart a very pretty high street where there is this fairly large church, a ragbag of materials including carstone, greenstone, flint, field rubble and the odd lump of limestone.

I got the key from another very nice man (don't these people go to church on a Sunday morning?) and let myself into a wide, aisled interior. Now, after Coveney there was no way it could have the same wow factor, but it was still a charming space, lightly restored and with some good early 20th Century glass. The stars of the show are a primitive Norman font carved with dragons and angels, a very curious piece, with a head at each corner as at Toftrees in Norfolk, and something I don't recall seeing before, a medieval stone pulpit with Perpendicular arcading. The screen was updated in the early 17th Century, and has cherubic faces carved on the doors. The new BoE thinks they were imported from elsewhere, but I saw no reason that they shouldn't be local work. An interesting church, but no greater than the sum of its parts.

The Bedford levels run not far off, and I headed westwards in that direction for about a mile to Mepal.

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Taken on: March 22, 2015
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Sets appears in:   • glass    • Witcham   
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Camera: Fujifilm FinePix S100FS, f/4.5, 1/600 sec, 42mm, ISO 400 (more info) (hide info)
Camera: Fujifilm FinePix S100FS
Aperture: f/4.5
Exposure Time: 0.002 sec (1/600)
Focal Length: 42mm
ISO: 400
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program: Program AE
Exposure Mode: Auto
Metering Mode: Multi-segment
White Balance: Auto
Color Space: sRGB
Software: Microsoft Windows Photo Viewer 6.1.7600.16385
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