Since early 2020, Forncett History Group has published regular short articles in the village magazine, the Forncett Flyer. These articles have now been collected here on our new blog - Forncett History Notes. This blog offers the opportunity for these articles, and other news from the Group, to be read more widely and also provides a forum for us to publish short articles which don't fit easily elsewhere within the structure of the website. Please share this new page with anyone who you feel might be interested. If you would like to be added to our email distribution list please Contact Us and then you will receive an alert when any new article appears.
As I write this, our summer weather continues to be cool and wet and we can only hope that August will bring a warm, sunny month. However, for the residents of Forncett, the August of 1912 brought some of the worst flooding ever seen in Norfolk.
St. Edmund's church in Forncett End has just celebrated its 120th birthday. At the beginning of the 20th Century the settlement of Forncett End was growing rapidly and as St. Peter's parish church was 2 miles away, it was decided to build a chapel of ease close to the New Buckenham - Norwich turnpike. The chapel was dedicated to...
For our May meeting, the History Group visited Forncett Industrial Steam Museum at the kind invitation of its founder, Rowan Francis. In the course of the evening Rowan took us around the museum and used the exhibits to tell us the story of the development of industrial steam from 1698 to 2024. Whilst there are other steam...
In January this year I wrote a History Note entitled "A poet in the churchyard" that related to one of the four magnificent stained-glass windows at St. Peter's church. Another of the windows, the Thorsby window, is in the North Aisle of the church and was installed in 1883. This window shows Saints Simeon and Anna and is "...
When we talk about recording history we tend to think about historical documents such as house deeds, wills, maps or census records, about drawings or photographs, and perhaps about personal letters or memoirs. However, since the second half of the last century, another form of historical record has begun to make its mark, namely oral history. When...
At the March meeting of Forncett History Group it was a great pleasure to welcome Joy Evitt from the Costume and Textiles Association (C&TA) to talk to us about the History of Norwich Shawls. The C&TA was founded in 1989 to promote the unique costume and textile heritage of Norwich and Norfolk and to promote interest and encourage research into...
A brief comment from Sally Tovell (née Weatherington) who lived at Forncett End Stores in the 1950s – "People in Forncett made excellent cider" - prompted me to investigate the history of cider-making in the parish.
A recent message to the Forncett History website, from a descendant of the Austin family, encouraged me to revisit the story of this family and to find (on the Ancestry website) a couple of rare photos of Forncett blacksmiths.
Forncett has two well-documented links to famous poets. Dorothy Wordsworth lived at St. Peter's rectory between 1788 and 1794, when her uncle, Rev. William Cookson, was the rector. Her more famous brother, William Wordsworth, also visited her here on a number of occasions. Nearly two hundred years later Philip Larkin, who was staying nearby at...
In these history articles we often discuss things that happened in Forncett very many years ago, but this month I want to celebrate something much more recent but equally historic – the twentieth anniversary of the Forncett Flyer.