Oby is incredibly difficult to find - lying, as it does, in the flat lands bordering the River Bure. It isn't marked on the Ordnance Survey map and there are few sign posts on the ground. (Turn off the B1152 and head for Thurne.) It's classified by Alan Davison as a deserted village and its church was finally abandoned in the late 16th Century. The nearby village of Ashby was also deserted.


In 1979, the poet George MacBeth (1932-1992) and his wife Lisa St Aubin de Terán moved into the The Old Rectory here. The Broadland landscape provided inspiration for his 1982 collection: Poems from Oby.

Here is his poem Yuletide in Norfolk:
 
The long-ships drove up the Bure, and the horned men were
   there to rape and to burn,
Seeding their names, Rollesby and Billockby, Fleggburgh,
   Clippesby and Thurne,
Ashby and Oby. Our church roofs came from the rot of each
   oak-warped stern.

But the Nazarene grip was strong. The surge of energy in
  the whoring blood
Settled for the purpled moan of the organ, the heifer
  chewing her cud,
And the cart with its thwarted axle broken and stuck in
  December mud.

I drive to the service at Clippesby, a mile along
  sugar-beet-sodden-road.
My lights throw up the parishioners, whipped by the
  Christian goad
And the hope of Heaven, their faces pinched by a cold,
  unearthly woad

Into shapes of bread and wine. Their archangels gloat and
  wither on spruce,
Bald winter's fuel from Norway. The tied surplice is
  shaken loose,
And the paean rises, the bitter semen of prayer squeezed
  like a juice.

Nothing can alter the sounded heritage from the
  throbbing brine,
The keels lifting above the waves. Let humility
  be divine.
All arrogance is human, the black ride of the Vikings
  is mine.


George MacBeth

In 1983 the couple left Oby to take on another restoration project - this time St. Mary's Hall at Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen in the Fens. By this time they had a son - the rather grandly named Alexander Morton George Macbeth. However, their marriage was precarious and after a few more years together they finally separated.

Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel The Corner that Held Them (1954) is set in Oby during the 14th Century.

Content from www.literarynorfolk.co.uk