Among the curious churches of this region, that of Fairfield, two miles north-west from Brookland, is well worth visiting. It is not a large church, nor beautiful, being, indeed, one of that very numerous company popularly supposed to be the “smallest,” and of a quaint, rather barn-like, appearance. It is not, in fact, the “smallest church in England,” that distinction belonging to the little church of Culbone, in Somerset, which is thirty-three feet in length. The length of Fairfield church is about forty feet, and it is thus somewhere about the same size as Bonnington. But it is very much less ecclesiastical in appearance, being chiefly of seventeenth-century red brick.
There is no village of Fairfield, and there are but two houses in sight in the flat marsh-land. Away in the distance you see the church of Stone in Oxney, cresting the uplands; the skylarks are singing madly in the May skies, and sheep are grazing; but it is a solitary spot. Dykes with tall rushes encircle the church, which for some years before 1913 had been closed, and was fallen into a ruinous condition. In the roof of this little building, dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, there were holes; the small timber bellcote was all on one side, and, of its three bells, one of them was cracked. The windows were broken, the wind-shutters hanging down from them, forlorn. Through the broken casements one might see the whitewashed interior, with the tiny chancel, scarcely lofty enough for a man of average height to stand in, upright, and the tall wooden pews: the whole a roosting-place for birds. The deserted building was at last restored, chiefly from funds granted by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Fairfield is in summer a prime curiosity; in winter, the church is generally inaccessible, through being entirely cut off by flood-water. “A dark place,” said a contemplative, solitary man, met in these wilds. Spiritually dark, he meant. In other ways, Fairfield, standing amid clear, wide horizons, with not a tree near it, is a place of exceptional light and sunshine. The colour of the marshes is vivid and lovely; and not less lovely is the golden hue of the lichened, red-tiled old roof of Fairfield church itself, seen from a little distance.