Edward Coke was pretty visionary in that respect.” “The whole place would have been very scenic,” says James, “like a very early English landscape garden. (“It was a sort of local barn wars at the time,” laughs James.) The village had been more or less entirely abandoned by the turn of the 17th century, and the barn’s construction – across one end of the main street – only confirmed Godwick’s demise.īut Coke had big plans for his newly acquired land: to complement the impressive barn and manor, the ruined church would be turned into a folly, and he would plant gardens and orchards to create one of Norfolk’s most impressive estates. It was a bold statement of wealth and power, on a par with anything the neighbouring estates could conjure up. In 1590, Sir Edward Coke – who became attorney general under both Elizabeth I and James I – took over the Old Hall at Godwick and also oversaw the construction of a great, red-brick barn a few years later. Until then it was in the hands of the Coke family (later the Earls of Leicester, whose seat is now the nearby Neo-Palladian pile Holkham Hall). James is the third generation of his family to own Godwick, his grandfather having bought the estate in 1959. Under the bemused stare of a pair of ewes, we trace the well-nibbled furrows through the fields, and slowly Godwick’s skeleton begins to take shape: side roads lead away from the main street depressions mark where the tofts once stood deep hollows in the ground are what remains of the pits once used to quarry chalk. ![]() Some might call it a divine intervention. All Saints’ tower, built mostly of jagged flints, is the most striking remnant of Godwick today, having just about managed to avoid the fate of the rest of the village. None of the wattle-and-daub houses remain, and, according to James, the faint tract through the grass we’re standing on was once Godwick’s main street. “But with the clay soil, heavy rainfall, cold winters… eventually, I think they decided to just give it up and move on.”Ī cold drizzle blows over us – little has changed on that front – but the small, poor village they left behind is long gone, probably forsaken at some point in the 15th century. “We don’t know for certain why people left Godwick,” says the estate’s owner James Garner. ![]() Now in ruins, it’s a crumbling symbol of a community lost to time. But Godwick’s is different – this isn’t one of those handsome country churches, complete with a peal of bells and a weathervane. This isn’t surprising – you can barely follow a country lane in Norfolk without stumbling upon a church, their towers and steeples like beacons above the fields. As I edge along a silent, unmade road in northeast Norfolk, the silhouette of All Saints Church appears on the horizon.
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