Gayton is a relatively large and busy village along the old Kings Lynn to Aylsham road. In this area of generally small churches St Nicholas is a grand 14th Century affair, its tall tower seeming even taller thanks to its lack of buttressing. You can't help wondering if there was a certain amount of competition with Grimston a couple of miles off, a similarly unusually large church for this area. The alternating quatrefoil and arched windows of the arcade echo those at Ingoldisthorpe and Snettisham on the other side of Kings Lynn. There is a blocked rood window in the gable at the east end of the nave. At the top of the tower, four lion pinnacles guard the corners around a dome, which looks as if it might have been an 18th Century fantasy. The tower is a bit of a puzzle, for on its eastern face is an old roofline, even higher and steeper than the current one, and below it a sanctus bell window which must once have looked down into the nave, but which is now exposed above the current roof. However, stepping inside there is yet another, older roofline, a good distance below the modern one, which must have been there before the arcades were built. Perhaps, the 14th century rebuilding of the church used the base of an older tower.

I've visited this church a number of times over the years and always found it open and welcoming. Visiting a church over a period of time enables you to see changes too, for stepping inside on this day in April 2023 I found that the 19th Century benches I had photographed six years earlier have now gone, to be replaced by modern chairs. I'm told that the old benches were riddled with woodworm, but they were of some quality and so I hope they were able to rescue a few to be sold. Less easy on the eye than the modern chairs is the great expanse of carpet, which always seems ill at ease in a country church. The early 14th Century font at the west end is probably contemporary with the rebuilding of the church. The current reordering has moved Brit Wikstrom's sculpture of Jacob wrestling with the angel into the north aisle, and the east end of the south aisle where it used to sit has been reinvented as a family area. The chapels in the south and north aisles retain a sense of the numinous which is perhaps harder to be aware of in the large and somewhat empty chancel, but all in all this is a church with a powerful sense of its use by a community, and it is always open daily.

The church retains the war memorial for the West Norfolk Oddfellows, a kind of friendly society who had their clubhouse in Gayton. It's now the village hall. When the organisation went out of existence the plaque ended up discarded in the outbuilding of a garage. It was found, recognised, and restored to its former glory in 1999, and placed in the church. It is a gentle reminder to us that many WWI memorials were not put up by churches at all, but were to be found in social clubs, village halls, schools, banks, shops, offices, and even on street walls. Of course, some of these are still in place to this day, but most are not.

The population of Gayton at the 1851 census, when rural Norfolk populations were reaching a peak, was a little short of nine hundred, of whom just seventy attended this church that morning. There were a few more for the afternoon sermon, but the Reverend Arthur Gilbert, the curate and acting incumbent at Gayton, felt moved to observe in his return to the Census of Religious Worship that the attendance was much less than usual on account of the wetness of the weather. Nevertheless, the attendances at Gayton's various chapels that morning would suggest that most of the parish's churchgoers were in fact non-conformists. The parish was home to the Freebridge-Lynn Union workhouse, erected in 1836 on the old Swaffham road to replace the old parish houses of industry. White's Directory of Norfolk reported in 1844 that it has room for 150 paupers, but has seldom more than 70 to 100. I assume that the workhouse had a chapel of its own, because attendance at service for residents was compulsory, and it is hard to see that could be included in the attendance figures for this church. But the workhouse made no return at the 1851 census of religious worship, so perhaps they did. I wonder what they would make of it if they could come back and see it now?

Simon Knott, April 2023

Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.