Now, here's an odd thing. Pattesley isn't a village - it isn't even a hamlet, just a name on a map in what must once have been the parish of Oxwick. But the church there is ruined now, and so it must have been subsumed into another parish. Or perhaps not; perhaps they took one look at the map and decided they needn't bother.

But Pattesley once had a church of its own, St John the Baptist, which had fallen into disuse like so many of the Fakenham area churches by about 1600; Pevsner recalls that it was described as whollye ruinated and decaied. By 1700 it had been converted into a house, and gradually elaborated and replaced. I only found it because I had recently been reading the entry for this house in Pevsner, and as we were driving from Oxwick to Whissonsett I noticed the name on the map. Pevsner says that the only surviving feature is the west door, now set inside the wall of the house. Obviously, it wouldn't have been reasonable for us to knock on the door and ask to see it, and so we drove past, and I looked back at this handsome building, imagining the glory that was there once.

Simon Knott, May 2006