What are the tales?
The tales featured in in Tales from Iceni Territory are typically a story of what the day in question revealed, whether that was an Iron Age settlement or the flora and fauna of a beach walk.
Every parish and every village across Iceni territory has a tale to tell. Gareth calls it 'bottom-up' history. Less about kings and queens (although Boudica features strongly) and more about what is there to be seen if you look closely enough.
The church pictured here is St Andrew's, Little Snoring. The tale is that of the church and it's relationship to Little Snoring airfield which lies next door.
8 June, Little Snoring, Norfolk
A few miles north-east of Fakenham lies Little Snoring, a village name that apparently derives from the first wave of Saxon invaders in the post Roman era and indicates along with Great Snoring, they were settlements of Snear’s people (Snear being a Saxon nicknamed ‘Swift, Bright or Alert’).
My motivation to visit Little Snoring is connected to more recent history, the establishment in July 1943 of an airfield to the north of the village. Its last military use was in 1953, but it remains an airfield for private aircraft today, making use of a small section of the main runway which was originally long enough to allow the operation of the Lancaster IIs of RAF 115 squadron.
By 1944, the station was assigned to 100 group and saw Beaufighters, Defiants and Mosquitos undertaking a variety of roles including experimental radio and radar warfare, flying night support for bombing raids and making low level attacks on enemy airfields.
At ‘ghost’ fields like East Wretham, it is not hard to visualise the planes taking off. At Little Snoring, with an air sock showing the wind direction and the wartime control tower clearly visible on the far side of the field above a fast-ripening barley crop, it is even easier to imagine.
We’d walked up a lane past St Andrew’s church to find the site of a stone commemorating the wartime airfield placed by the Airfields of Britain Conservation Trust. The church, sited on the airfield perimeter, was used by RAF personnel through the war years and is one of only two churches in East Anglia where the tower is separate from the body of the church.
The best explanation for this in the case of St Andrew’s is that the Norman flint round tower was constructed as a part of an earlier Saxon church, the later Norman nave being either built alongside or built to replace the earlier place of worship. The latter appears most feasible as there are indications of materials being re-used in its construction.
Sited on rising ground next to a small stream, it’s a wonderfully peaceful and unspoiled spot which for many years has been a place of pilgrimage for those who served here during the war. We stopped to admire the early (Norman) font and to read the RAF honours boards salvaged from the Officer’s Mess, saved and re-sited in the church. They record medals won, enemy aircraft damaged or destroyed, rather than the cost of lives lost in the conflict.
I signed our names in the visitor’s book and quietly saluted the airmen of Little Snoring.
Copright: Gareth Brookman, Tales from Iceni Terriitory 2023