CHURCH LARKING - Holt Parish Church

St Andrews is an ordinary, and not particularly remarkable church. Holt as a town is wealthy these days. But in the past it was definitely the poorer cousin to the coastal ports of Cley or Blakeney. Though there is a church noted in the Doomsday Book in 1066, not much of this survives bar a Norman font. What you see today is 14th-15th century in origin.

All of medieval Holt was wiped out in a fire in 1708. This was situated to the east of the present church. The church building was left pretty much gutted at that time. The present building is those ruins heavily restored in 1727 and the 19th century, as best they could. Whilst the Georgian buildings, for which Holt is now so renowned, were constructed off to the west of it.

The squat sturdy looking tower once featured a spire which has since been lost. The exterior of the nave walls look very patchy, appearing to have been rendered over at some point in order to hold them together. Indicating a period when substantial repairs were too costly, so a bodge of rendering was applied. This poverty seems not to be the case now, with a large well built modern hall and rooms built to one side in the 21st century.

The church interior is generally quite plain and largely shorn of embellishment. The wooden roof, though  is a rather splendid one, with pierced work echoing the window tracery pattern. There is a delicate, and likely original piscina and sediia. The extensive stained glass windows are all Victorian or later, but contains some rather fine examples. A lovely minimally decorated sacramental side Chapel, is framed by a decorative elongated arch. With a modern wood statue of St Andrew standing guard at its entrance.

As with many churches on the North Norfolk coast, Holt has a strong Anglo Catholic flavour to it. A small arched shrine just to the right of the Sacramental Chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Walsingham. And contemporary panels spaced out along both sides of the nave, house modernist interpretations of aspects of the Stations of the Cross. As a church Holt is frightfully neat but underwhelming. Apart from these modern panels, which are simply weird growths on a wall.