St Michael the Archangel, Booton

The church at Booton is an extraordinary building, the product of one man’s eccentric imagination. The Reverend Whitwell Elwin, a descendant of Pocahontas of Hiawatha fame, built the church at the end of the 19th century without the help of an architect, borrowing details from other churches throughout the country. Some of his models can be identified; the west doorway was inspired by Glastonbury Abbey, for example, but the slender twin towers which soar over the wide East Anglian landscape and the central pinnacle which looks almost like a minaret, seem to have sprung solely from his imagination. Dramatic wooden angels hold up the roof, the work of James Minns, a well-known master-carver whose carving of a bull’s head is still the emblem on Colman’s Mustard. The delicately coloured stained glass windows also show angels, a series of musicians with flowing hair and pretty female faces. Edwin Lutyens, the distinguished architect who married the daughter of one of Elwin’s oldest friends, said the church was ‘very naughty but built in the right spirit’. You may love the church; you may be outraged by it, but you cannot remain unmoved by such an exuberant oddity.