Some of the photos that I didn’t upload from the Shotesham walk a couple of weeks ago….
Category: Shotesham
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Shotesham – St. Martin’s Church
This ruined church is in Shotesham St. Mary and it’s dedicated to St. Martin, having originally been constructed in around the eleventh century. Most of the current building, or what’s left of it, dates to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.
Looking towards the tower from the east end of the church. Walking with my friend Rob, he mentioned how clear the sky was without any aircraft trails visible, which is quite right but isn’t something that I’d thought about.
The walls are made of flint, with some brick dressing, and are surprisingly robust in the sections that remain. They’ve received some work recently to strengthen them, so hopefully they’ll last for some time yet.
The church was abandoned in probably the seventeenth century and it had become derelict by the nineteenth century. Given how many other churches there are in the Shotesham area, even the Victorians didn’t feel the need to restore this one.
The former roof line where the nave met the tower is visible, but the high quality of the construction is apparent at the top of the arch.
Until a few years ago, this church was covered in ivy which had taken hold from the 1950s and had made it more difficult to visit and it was also causing long-term damage to the structure. The work to clean up the site led to the discovery in the south wall of evidence of the location of the holy water stoup. There are no gravestones visible, but the site remains consecrated and it’s in the care of Shotesham Parochial Church Council.
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Shotesham – Name Origin
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been to Shotesham and my visit today saw some warm weather. A bit too hot, but there we go. Anyway, the origins of the village name.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary comments on this name:
Shotesham, Norfolk. Shotesham in 1044, Scotesham in Domesday Book, Schotesham Omnium Sanctorum in 1254. Scott person, literally from Scotland or Ireland.
The 1254 longer version of the name means Shotesham All Saints, but it’s impressive that the village had the same unchanged name nearly 1,000 years ago of Shotesham. The ‘ham’ means farm, homestead or settlement, but I’m not sure what Scots person exactly this is named after. I’m sure that whoever it was that they’d be surprised to see just what a legacy they had on the area.
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Shotesham – Shotesham Rocket
Located near to the village of Shotesham, near to All Saints Church, is this sign which gives some history about why there’s a hole here.
The depression, which is a little hard to make out here now because of the trees, was caused by a German V2 missile which caused damage to 43 buildings in the village. It was fired on 6 October 1944, the only such attack in the UK that day, and fortunately no-one was hurt during the explosion. As the sign notes, it’s not entirely clear what the Germans were trying to hit, but it’s thought that it might have been the Radar Station at Upper Stoke. So, it wasn’t a marvellously accurate attack, as that’s a few miles away.
The rocket was fired from Rijsterbos in the Netherlands and it travelled at around 3,000 miles per hour and descended from a height of fifty miles. The rockets caused significant damage to the area where they landed, with craters being around twenty metres in width and eight metres in depth. If this would have been developed and used earlier in the war, its impact could have been terrifying as they were nearly impossible for the British military to be able to stop once they were fired.
