Aldborough is the largest of the villages in the area between Cromer and Aylsham, a handsome village with a pub beside its pretty village green, a good place to sit and watch cricket on a sunny afternoon. And yet, there is something missing, for most unusually for East Anglia there is no village church in Aldborough. Instead, you can find no less than three medieval churches in a line along the nearby Holt to North Walsham road, each about half a mile apart and all very different from each other. The most easterly of the three is the parish church of St Mary, Aldborough, and the other two are the parish churches of Thwaite and Alby.

While Alby and Thwaite are landmarks, towerless St Mary hides behind hedges, and is fairly understated. The tower fell in the 18th century, and now the repointing of the flint and the early 20th century turret belies the fact that it is of great interest. And even as you step in, you feel that this is a busy, much-loved place, zealously taken care of by its community.

As you might expect in this part of Norfolk, there are some good medieval figure brasses. They are mostly to members of the Herward family, and date from the 1480s. Two are to Robert Herward, in full armour, and his wife Anne, in a butterfly headdress. The other is to an unknown civilian of the same period. A low arcade separates the nave from the13th century north aisle, but otherwise the overwhelming feel is of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Six bold saints stand attendance in the aisle and the chancel, four of them memorials to local lads lost in the Great War. The aisle windows are by Powell & Sons, and depict St Michael and St Francis from the 1920s, and St Peter and St John from the 1930s. But the best glass is in the chancel, depicting St George and St Edmund above a landscape of Suvla Bay, and is by William Aikman in 1925.

St Edmund and St George remember Edmund Gay, who was a soldier in the infamous 1st/5th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. Largely recruited from farmworkers on estates in north Norfolk, they sailed for Gallipolli, and were wiped out during the attack on Anafarta in Suvla Bay on the 12th of August 1915.

Because they had fallen behind enemy lines, they were listed as missing, and a Norfolk legend grew up that they had vanished into a mysterious cloud and were taken up out of this world. This sounds bizarre, but it was of a piece with legends like the Angel of Mons leading the British troops to escape death in Flanders, and with the great rise in spiritualism in this country in the years immediately after the War. Perhaps it was the dust and heat of that day which gave rise to the legend. Many of the dead boys were workers from the Sandringham estate, and when the bodies were eventually found and identified this knowledge was kept from Queen Alexandra, because it was felt that the truth would be too upsetting for her. Thus, she died believing the legend.

Simon Knott, May 2018