The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
East Anglia (RC) (now)
Roman Catholic church
The Roman Catholic church of Our Lady of Consolation, designed by Henry Clutton, was built in 1877-8 for Yolande Lyne-Stephens (d.1894), a widowed Catholic heiress. Close to her home at Lynford Hall, it was effectively a chapel of ease for the nearest Catholic church some ten miles away in Thetford. The series of rectangular panels with low-relief Romanesque carving set into the plinths of the ten buttresses appears to have been incorporated during the construction of the 19thc building, rather than inserted later. The panels may have come from one of Thetford's dismantled earlier post-Conquest buildings. Three of them are carved with figures and the remainder with architectural motifs, one of which occurs frequently on Romanesque churches in the region. Aspects of the design and execution of the Lynford reliefs compare with sculpture of the late 11thc in Upper Normandy. The fourteen reset panels represent the only Romaneque sculpture at this site. They are numbered here in sequence, starting at the east end of the building and continuing anti-clockwise.