On moonless nights when shadows cloak the land, the ghost light of St Edmund at Thurne sometimes appears in the tower – an echo from the past when it was used to signal for help.
A lonely sentinel on raised ground in the middle of fields, the church at Thurne – the Saxon word for a thorn bush – is just off the Weaver’s Way, its beautiful churchyard managed by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. Hidden in the tower, however, is something unusual.
There is a strange spyhole at eye level in the church tower which points directly at another of Norfolk’s isolated places of worship: St Benet’s Abbey on Norfolk’s River Bure, and it said was an early form of communication in times of great need. If the candle was lit, it sent a clear message to the monks at St Benet’s, many of whom had medical knowledge: “Please send help now”.
As its own website says: “The origins of St Benet’s Abbey are shrouded in uncertainty and coloured by myth. Nothing in this tidal, marshy landscape lasts forever. What we know for certain is that by the 12th century, with Norfolk at the peak of its wealth and influence, St Benet’s Abbey was a powerful player.
“In Tudor times, when Henry VIII shut down monasteries across England, St Benet’s was the only one not officially closed. Yet swiftly, most of its buildings vanished, including its centrepiece church.”
In Lantern, the Lowestoft-based Borderline Science Investigation Group’s publication, of winter 1981, the story of Thurne’s ghostly light was told. Lantern’s piece quotes James Wentworth Day, in his book Marshland Adventure, written in 1950, which reports that a local man told Day of the light that appears from nowhere on dark nights.
“When the monks were about over there in St Benet’s and there was illness in Thurne village, or at Oby, or Clippesby…they used to light a torch in the top room of the church tower.
“That light shined across the waters to the Abbey. And then the monks knew there was sickness and need of a doctor. So they’d come rowing in their little boat, a mile and a half across the fens to tend whoever needed them.”
Some say that the ‘spyhole’ is in fact a squint, a hole through which lepers were able to view the priest who was consecrating Holy Communion bread without infecting worshippers and perhaps it was used for this, too. Others believe the hole was from a time when there was a special cell attached to the church which would have been lived in by an anchoress or an anchorite.
Like Julian of Norwich, an anchoress was a woman who was walled into a cell to live a life of prayer and contemplation (the male equivalent was an anchorite) – it was a strangely popular way of life for the devoutly religious in medieval times. An anchoress’ cell was attached to a church and contained three windows, one where a servant would bring food and dispose of waste, another that opened on the church so the anchoress could partake of Mass and a third to look out on the outside world. Some anchoress’ never left their cell, even after death…
Another story about Thurne’s church is just as bizarre as the ghost lights: Norwich philosopher Sir Thomas Browne noted in 1654 that a Richard Ferrer had been buried at St Edmund’s wearing an ox hide, complete with horns, in order to confuse anyone who dug up his body in later years.
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