Aylmerton is one of those dozens of quiet little villages caught in the folds of the rolling landscape a few miles in from the north Norfolk coast. As with a fair number of the others, it has a round towered church which sits on a rise above the village street. Pevsner thought that the tower was probably early 13th Century but, as he points out, given that the upper part was rebuilt in 1912, can the tracery, implying c1300, and the flushwork, implying c1400, be trusted? If they can then it gives a good idea of a tower built and refashioned at a leisurely pace over the course of a couple of centuries. The church itself was mostly rebuilt over the subsequent century, and there were two big 19th Century restorations.

The church you step into has largely the character of those restorations, which brought the font, but also of the early 20th Century too, for not only was the tower repaired but there were refurnishings. 1904 brought the glass in the east window by Ernest Hemmings depicting the parable of the sower, a sower went forth to sow and the reapers were the angels. The background details are perhaps better than the main figures. The glass on the north side of the nave is roughly contemporary and more interesting. By Powell Brothers of Leeds, it depicts the Ascension, not always a well-done subject in glass, flanked by the angel at the empty tomb and the Resurrection. The three scenes seem to flow seamlessly into each other. The glass is in memory of Marion Emily Ketton who died in 1898.

There are no aisles, but a small lady altar shoehorned into the south-east corner of the nave is delightful. It has a roundel of a Blessed Virgin and Christchild set in an art deco reredos, for all the world like an ecclesiological wireless set. Also art deco is the war memorial, set oddly in the side of the organ. Up in the chancel, the main altar is something else again, fronted by decorative classical pillars with two lilies flanking the six-pointed star of the Holy Trinity. A relief of the Deposition from the Cross looks as if it was once from a set of 19th Century stations of the cross.

Two memories of Empire can be found in memorials here. Geoffrey Daniel Spurrell Mills was killed in a railway accident near the Sheba Mine, Transvaal in 1904. He was 19 years old. Twenty years later, Jessie Pearse passed on at Johannesburg. Born at Aylmerton, she was the daughter of the vicar. A mile or so south of the church is a memory of much earlier times, the Aylmerton Cross, a restored medieval preaching cross standing at a T junction with the road from Metton to Gresham. A fourth rough track going off opposite shows that this was once a crossroads, and the old track points, intriguingly, across the fields to the holy shrine of Walsingham.

Simon Knott, December 2022

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