In the centre of Pulham Market the village green is wide without sprawling, and two old inns face each other across it. Behind one is St Mary Magdalene church, with its powerful 15th century tower. The inns, and many of the other houses, date from the 18th and even 17th centuries
No one would seriously think of Pulham Market as a town today. But the green was the market place, and as the name suggests this was a market town from the 12th century until well into the 17th century. There was a railway station, but the line has now gone, and the main Ipswich to Norwich road now bypasses the village
St Mary Magdalene is a big church. Externally, it is hard to see anything that is not late-medieval, and this building would look quite at home in the centre of Norwich. The Victorians treated St Mary Magdalene to an overwhelming restoration in the 1870s. They don't seem to have touched the structure much, and just about all the money, £1,800, went on internal furnishings. Pevsner quotes this amount from Kelly's Directory with one eyebrow raised, because it is about £350,000 in today's money, which is not much to pay for rebuilding an aisle or a tower, but buys an awful lot of Minton tiles and pitchpine benches at a time when, it is worth recalling, labour was very cheap
The niches that flank the west window and door of the tower appear to have their original statues in, albeit vandalised too much to be certain. It appears to be an Annunciation scene. As at nearby Pulham St Mary, there is a grand early 16th century porch - not as ornate as the one in the sister village, and on the north side this time. A curiosity is that the large east window of the porch lights directly into the west end of the north aisle. This would seem to suggest that the porch predated the aisle, but it is so late that it is hard to think that there would have been time to build it before the Reformation set in. As we will see inside, the arcades have little to offer on the subject. Perhaps the window was an attempt to lighten what is a fairly dark interior. Today, some panels of medieval glass have been reset among frosted quarries, better than it sounds but difficult to photograph without through light
As well as the big 1870s restoration, throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, fabulous money was being spent here on glass of the highest quality. Happily, the received tradition has come down far enough for us to see much of it as artistically significant; this church is a treasure house of Victorian styles. The very earliest is in the east window, of 1838, in the Pre-Raphaelite style that would flower in England over the next two decades. It depicts three scenes in the life of St Mary of Magdala, an unusual subject in itself, but one which the Victorians loved for the frisson of a fallen woman that it provided. In the centre, Mary sobs at the foot of the cross; on the north side she washes the feet of Christ, a gorgeously erotic scene, and on the right she returns to the upper room to tell the disciples that the tomb is empty. The artist is Henry Halladay, the glassmakers Heaton, Butler and Bayne
And so to the cache itself. You are looking for a cunningly hidden magnetic nano. No further hints because it’s designed to be a tricky one
If anybody would like to expand to this series please do, I would just ask that you could let Sadexploration know first so he can keep track of the Church numbers and names to avoid duplication.There is also a Church Micro Stats page found via the Bookmark list