One summer day in 1992, Gloria Davey was on a WI ramble, treading the footpaths south-east of Swaffham, when the party came to the deserted ruin of Houghton church. The roof of the nave had collapsed, the tower was enshrouded in ivy and the churchyard was a jungle of undergrowth.

It wasn't exactly a new discovery because most local people knew it was there; on a ridge, it was easily visible from a distance. But several hundred metres off the nearest lane, it no longer had visitors - or not in daylight, anyway.

Opting for a closer look, Gloria managed to get inside and the first thing she found was evidence of Satanic worship. Returning home, she told her husband, Bob, a retired engineer and parish councillor at nearby North Pickenham, who straightaway organised patrols to deter the Satanists although they continued to turn up periodically under cover of darkness for months, having apparently been using the place for 30 years.

But casting out the Devil was the easy bit, for Bob became determined that the church should be fully rescued and through the Parish Council, he approached the County Council to see what could be done.

As it happened, the County already had Houghton on its list of 20 of Norfolk's 100 or so ruined medieval churches which, together with English Heritage, they would soon get around to repairing - or at least stabilising to prevent further deterioration. So, when Bob's letter arrived, the County saw local enthusiasm and half a chance that any repairs would not simply revert to disrepair through local apathy.

And yet, it was still a bit of a gamble, firstly because the church had been disused for 60 or 70 years and secondly because every village in the area still had a church, but this church had no village.
Indeed, these days there isn't much at all at Houghton-on-the-Hill - to give it its full name - except the church and nearby Houghton farm. It was big enough to feature on Faden's map of Norfolk of 1797 and in 1805, topographer, Francis Blomefield, noted 'a farm or two and a cottage or two'; White's directory of 1854 described a 'small parish with 10 houses, 50 souls and 600 acres of land'. But by the 20th century, it was all but gone with just a couple of, by then, long derelict 18th century cottages surviving until the '90s.

As for the church, it was obviously old, with the nave dating from an era straddling the Norman conquest - opinions range from 950AD, late Saxon, to 1090 (and excavations in the floor suggest three or four earlier naves going back to the seventh century). There is re-used Roman material in the walls - the Peddars Way is just down the slope and a Roman villa stood nearby. More particularly, the corners of this nave have 'long-and-short work', large stones laid alternately along each wall for strengthening flint rubble construction, a Saxon technique born of necessity in a region with little workable building stone, though it did continue briefly after the Conquest until the Normans began to fetch limestone from France and other parts of England.

But during the early 20th century, the church then with no village was gradually abandoned, a process probably hastened by collateral damage from a zeppelin which, losing height, ditched its bombs in the churchyard in October 1916.

The last baptism was in 1933, the last wedding in 1925 when a Miss Anderson became Mrs Colwell. She was a servant at Houghton Farm where her father was under-shepherd. In an illuminating snapshot of working conditions of the time, she once told Bob that her father had to live in a hut in the fields close to the sheep at lambing time and didn't see his children for three months. So every Sunday, their mother took them to church Sunday school and slipped over the fields to see him.

The church wasn't used much after 1929, just the occasional summer service with music from a harmonium taken up there each April by horse and cart and taken back in October, and slowly, it became another redundant pile abandoned to nature with no obvious catchment to sustain it.
Thus, because it was now potentially a black hole for public money, the initial decision by the County and English Heritage was simply to shore up arches, buttress walls and generally make sure that nothing else fell down.

That changed when County Council surveyor, Dr David Watt, inspected the timbers, and decided to reinstate the roof, rather than remove what was left, something welcomed by Bob who, by then, had already been organising occasional services in the still roofless church. It was also crucial to the subsequent chain of events for it was then that they found the wall paintings.

The inside of the nave had been replastered in Victorian times but where that plaster had crumbled, it revealed 16th century biblical text which, on closer examination, was found to overlay wall paintings from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, all of them in turn overlaying Romanesque paintings which are now thought to date from when the church was built.

They were found first in the north window arch and then elsewhere in the nave when wall painting restoration consultants, Hurst Associates, were called in. Portraying the Holy Trinity and various prophets, disciples and angels, they were quickly recognised as the most important discovery of their type in England for 20 years. Though much faded now, they had once been very colourful with pigments including cinnabar, just about the most expensive at the time. The only comparable items in England are Anglo-Saxon paintings in Nether Wallop church, Hampshire and 11th/12th century work in a group of Sussex churches.

The discovery changed the game a bit. Suddenly, all sorts of people got involved, most notably the Courtauld Institute at London University, recognised as a leading world authority on wall paintings, whose research and monitoring at Houghton are on-going.

There is now a committee of 30 steering the church's future which includes the Council for the Care of Churches, Leicester University and Bob himself while funding has come from among others Breckland Council, Waste Recycling Environmental, (WREN), the Council for the Care of Churches and The Garfield Weston Foundation.

And the work continues to turn up more intrigue, most recently during the digging of new surface water soakaways, which have yielded 17 skeletons, not so unexpected in a churchyard perhaps, but seven were found in separate layers in one pit.

'One was only two feet down' says Bob, pointing to the pit. 'A woman with a gunshot wound to the temple who died in the 1600s, perhaps a bystander to a Civil War skirmish. Two levels down, another had been buried with an infant laying across her chest. At the bottom was another woman buried perhaps about 1100.'

As he tells me this, he notices something in the dirt at his feet and picks up a human tooth. He examines it briefly, just as some Dutch people arrive; they have read about the church on the Internet.

Bob and Gloria continue to lavish love on the project with Bob spending time there nearly every day. They have spent substantial sums of their own money, buying hardcore to make the track passable to vehicles, paying for the architect's drawings for replacing the floors in the tower and re-roofing it. 'We didn't like the idea of the tower being left an empty shell' says Bob. The Norfolk Churches Trust and English Heritage paid for the actual work.

He has transformed the churchyard where among his plantings are snowdrops descended from bulbs of Galanthus plicatus brought back from the Crimea in 1856 by a Captain Adlington of nearby Holme Hale Hall who was reminded of home when they flowered amid the melting Crimean snows. In the churchyard, Bob found the original alter stone, dumped - but not broken - by Cromwell's church commissioners. It is now back in the church.

And the services continue with a biggest congregation to date of 224.

'When we get that many, some stand outside and hope it doesn't rain' he says. 'It did rain when we had 152 at last summer's annual celebration for the church's rebirth but we managed to cram them in standing. At Christmas, we had a lovely carol service with a battery powered organ and everyone holding battery candles.'

All of which sounds a touch more welcoming than Devil worship. But for Bob, this whole project has been and remains a labour of love. He has received an award from the Norfolk Society for his effort and has even been to tell the Queen about it. But the real joy for him is clearly to see the whole thing coming back together.

'Oh, it's a marvellous job' he says with a chuckle. 'I'd be lost without it. Every time you discover something - skeletons, stained glass - it all adds to it. Whatever season of the year, it's lovely up here.'

These days, it certainly is.

Contacts:
Bob Davey 01760 440470
Stephen Heywood, Conservation Officer, NCC 01603 222707