Matlaske is an attractive village in the gentle hills of north Norfolk. The village street lines the southern edge of the park of Barningham Hall, and no doubt most of the inhabitants worked on the Barningham estate in years gone by. St Peter is a small round-towered church at the eastern end of the village. The building has a quirky, truncated appearance because part of the chancel collapsed during morning service one Sunday in 1726. Mortlock tells us that the wall fell outwards, and nobody was hurt. There is a short, wide south aisle, and as a result you step through the north doorway into what is an inevitably square space.

At the west end of the nave, the rubble and brick eastern side of the tower has been exposed. Characterful corbel heads look down from the tower arch on a pleasingly rustic interior. Matlaske was obviously high in the Anglo-Catholic firmament at some point, and what survives today is devotional and seemly. The 1860s bible is still in use, and the service book on the altar dates from the early years of the 20th Century. All in all the interior is a time capsule.

The decalogue boards that would have flanked the sanctuary before the Victorian period have been reused to form a little room at the west end of the aisle. These combined with the over-sized royal arms of George III above the door into the now-blocked south porch create a cluttered junk-shop feel to this corner, which is not unpleasing. Back in the nave. the altar rails came here from nearby North Barningham when the church there was declared redundant. Hanging in front of the makeshift sanctuary is one of those big brass chandeliers familiar from several churches around here, but in such a small space as this it makes a dramatic statement, evocative of those exciting days of early 20th Century Anglican triumphalism, now out of sight.

Simon Knott, June 2021

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