North-east Norfolk is richly populated with small villages, but the straggling Broads system can make the connections between them convoluted. Horsey is a good example of this, for it is set not far from the coast halfway along the long road that runs between Waxham and the Somertons, three miles from either. There's no other way of getting to it unless you have a boat and a stout pair of walking boots, which gives it a pleasing remoteness. Approaching from the south, your first sight is of the splendid Horsey windmill, now in the care of the National Trust, as is Horsey Mere behind it. Beyond, a surprise in this landscape of straight roads, flat fields and drainage ditches, the village is a wooded oasis of old houses set around a knot of lanes, and among them this pretty little church with its thatched roof and round tower. The tower has an octagonal bellstage, the kind of thing that was often added to round towers the end of the medieval period. The lower part of the tower is all of a piece with the church beside it, most likely the work of the early 13th Century, although the overall impression is of the crispness of a considerable but not unsuccessful mid-19th Century restoration carried out by the rector's younger brother, leaving it looking a little like a country cottage with a tower attached..

You step into an interior which is endearingly rough and ready. Several of the windows have coloured glass in them, one of which forms the most memorable feature of the church, a memorial window to Catherine Ursula Rising of neighbouring Horsey Hall, who died in 1890. It shows her painting at an easel in a room which has been identified as the drawing room of the Hall. The window forming a background behind her effectively acts as a window out of the church too, a charming effect. At the bottom of the window is a Broads wherry. There appears to be no record of who the glass workshop was.

The view east in the narrow nave is towards a simple late medieval screen with the chancel beyond under a single continuous roof. Robert Elveden's 1509 bequest of 6s 8d to gild the partico (which is to say screen) survives, and hauntingly there are still traces of paint visible.The other glass includes the pairing of St Peter and St Paul, which Birkin Haward thought was probably foreign in origin. These are small intrusions into a delicious rural 19th Century interior carved out of an ancient space, for the overwhelming feel is of organic wood and brick. A disproportionately large reading desk stands below the former rood loft entrance. The small font with its arcaded panels sits to the west of the plain benches and the pretty little holy table in the sanctuary. Above, ring candelabras hang from the roof. There is no ceiling, and so you can see the thatch poking through.

A curiosity up on the north wall of the sanctuary is a group of three recesses. The outer two appear to have had fixings for doors. Cautley thought they were all aumbries, but this seems unlikely. The sanctuary itself is tiled in a delightful jazz modern style, quite a contrast with the rustic nave! On a sunny morning, light floods across it from the east window before heading westwards down the church to pick out the old woodwork and to smooth the stone. No memorials appear to have survived the 19th Century restoration, but one on the north wall remembers Harold Charlton Bradshaw, who died in 1943. He was the secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission. His inscription tells us that, in the words of the antiphon, he had understanding of righteousness and discerned great and marvellous wonders, which is a lovely thing to say about anyone.

Simon Knott, June 2023

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