All Saints, Santon This is one of England's smallest churches, and it sits on the edge of its largest forest. You cross the river out of Suffolk, and before you reach the Cambridge to Norwich railway line 50 yards on, you turn off right on a track that leads down to the picnic site. Beyond the tables and benches you reach three houses, all that remains of the village of Santon. All Saints huddles among them. Remains of a moat to the west of the church look likely to be all that is left of a now-vanished moated farmhouse, a reminder of quite how close we are to Suffolk. Santon Downham was once the hamlet to this, the larger settlement, but the centuries turn, the world changes, and now there is only a name on the map. All Saints managed to continue services up into the 1970s, but its redundancy was inevitable. Today, the village is part of the Norfolk civil parish of Weeting, but its ecclesiastical parish is Santon Downham, which is mostly in Suffolk. Because of this, All Saints was not only Norfolk's smallest church, it was the only Norfolk church in the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.The church was essentially rebuilt in the 19th Century, as though some spoilt Victorian child had demanded a toy church, and Daddy had one built in the back garden. Mortlock notes that it had in any case been rebuilt previously in the early 17th Century, restored to use at that exciting time of sacramental revival before puritanism triumphed, after being abandoned at the Reformation.
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