Our parish is longest north to south, bordering Marlingford, Easton and Bawburgh in the north. Little Melton and Hethersett on the east and Barford, Wramplingham and Downham/Wymondham on the western side.  The parish’s topography is hilly with extensive woodland areas, the main industry is agriculture, with the poorer agricultural land in the north of the parish; improving to the better farming land at the southern end of the parish.

 

Concentration on cereal farming with increased, very sophisticated, mechanisation of many farming operations has led to reduced numbers of agricultural workers and redundant farm buildings.  Some tenants have diversified into providing livery stable services, others into repurposing unused farm buildings for commercial storage and small scale industrial premises.

 

For the past three hundred years the parish land and housing has been in the possession of the Lombe family (later Evans-Lombe) and the reason the parish looks the way it does today is because of the owning family’s desire, over many generations, to make the space in which they live have a particular character.  The majority of the parish land and woodland is now managed by the owning family, only a small number of tenancies remain.

 

Despite its quite large area, the parish has never been wealthy and always been sparsely populated; there are under two hundred names on the Electoral Roll.  Formerly, the housing in the parish was exclusively built as and when required by the land owners; a process that came to an end about a hundred years ago.  Today, many surplus houses, barns and cottages have been sold (the poorest were demolished years ago) and over the past fifty years there has been a marked increase in the proportion of owner-occupied housing in the parish.

 

The only building in the parish that can truly be said to belong to parishioners is our Church or, to be more accurate, one church and the ruined tower of another one.  Paying for the upkeep of the church from a very small parish community is a major problem and promoting events to raise funds from outside the parish has to be a continual process in order to maintain the Church’s finances.

 

The parish has a very active Cricket Club based in Great Melton Park and next door to it a very popular Bowls Club.  Both of which have many more members from outside the parish than from within.  The Cricket Club is a prominent source of training for all ages of Norfolk cricket players and the club fields several teams to provide playing experience for players of all standards.  The Bowls Club, which must have one of the most beautiful surroundings of any club in Norfolk,  does not play in any leagues, their games are purely friendly “social” contests, with a concentration on the social aspect of the meeting.  It seems to be a popular concept.

 

The bowls and the cricket club are fortunate in having dedicated groundsmen living in the parish who use their hard work and ability to maintain the grounds in splendid condition, at times in the most difficult circumstances.

 

The future of parish must be said to be uncertain.  Hethersett expansion has now brought near continuous housing from Little Melton through Hethersett to Wymondham. Great Melton lies in the cusp of that expansion and will become increasingly in its thrall.  But, we are privileged to live in a parish where wildlife in all its forms is encouraged, long may it remain so.

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David Gregory, Member of the Great Melton History Group

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The village history

 

The research project that led to the publication of a World War I Roll of Honour stretched back over ten years; it began with the War Memorial itself and secured its ongoing custodianship in the care of Great Melton Parish Council.  Work then progressed to finding more information about the young parishioners who died in the First World War.  With fragments of information from several sources the group was able to build a reasonable picture of the young lives that ended tragically on the fields of France.

 

The very large numbers of parish men who were called to serve their country during the final years of the conflict seemed too large to contemplate the production of a complete biography for them all.  But, with pieces of research combined with information from new found resources and background reading, a pattern began to emerge from the emptiness and what seemed impossible became possible, then, some little time and endeavour later, became done. Fragments of new information still emerge from time to time and continue to add a little more to our understanding of how Great Melton was affected by the Great War. 

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The Great Melton History Group has written a timeline starting from the Stone Age through to modern day.