Feltwell

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Feltwell is a village and civil parish in Norfolk, England, near the border with Cambridgeshire. It sits about 11 miles northwest of Thetford and 34 miles southwest of Norwich. The parish covers around 20 square miles and had a population of 3,112 at the 2021 census.

The name Feltwell comes from Anglo-Saxon origins. In the past there were Roman settlements here, including two villas and two bathhouses. Feltwell appears in the Domesday Book with 124 residents in Grimshoe hundred. Over the centuries the land was divided among various owners, including the East Anglian estates of William the Conqueror, William de Warenne, and the Abbey of St Etheldreda, Ely. In 1382 the poet John Gower bought Feltwell and nearby Moulton, then granted the manors to others.

In 1944 a Lancaster bomber from the nearby RAF Feltwell crashed in the parish during World War II. The crash site was excavated in 1982.

The parish stretches west to the Cambridgeshire border along the River Little Ouse. Brandon Bank, a hamlet on the river, lies across the county line, with St John Little Ouse church in Littleport parish on the Cambridgeshire side.

St Nicholas Church, a Grade I listed building located on Hythe Road, is now a redundant church cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust. The village’s active Anglican parish church is St Mary’s, also Grade I listed. St Mary’s mostly dates from the fifteenth century, rebuilt after a tower collapse in 1898, and is notable for its nineteenth-century French stained glass by Édouard Didron and Eugène Oudinot. It contains a memorial to Lt-Col. Edward G. Hibbert of the Grenadier Guards.

A Primitive Methodist chapel once stood at Brandon Bank on the Norfolk side of the river.

RAF Feltwell opened in 1937 and played a role in the Second World War with Vickers Wellingtons. After the war, Thor missiles were stationed there, and the airfield was later leased to the United States Air Force. Today the site is used as accommodation for Americans based at RAF Mildenhall and is known for its three large radomes.

Feltwell is home to Feltwell Primary School, named after Edmund Moundeford, a local 17th-century figure. The village has a long-standing pub dating to the eighteenth century (The Chequers closed in 2017), as well as a shop, off-licence, restaurant and wine-bar, plus a doctors’ surgery, pharmacy, a veterinary practice, and a garage.