Other survivals of the years of neglect include a haunting framed decalogue board, probably of the 17th Century, and fragments of Elizabethan texts on the wall, one punched through with two earlier medieval image niches which must have been plastered over before the text was painted. The medieval font has an 18th century cover, although there's no telling if it came from here originally. The wooden war memorial, which may have been locally made, has six names. Pevsner mentions a 15th century alabaster panel, presumably from an altar, which was found in the church in the 19th century. It seems no longer to be here, and when I mentioned it to the keyholder back in 2005 she hadn't heard of it. Still, so much has survived to be thankful for.

And now, that curious connection. About seven miles off to the south-east is the village of Tuttington. This makes them sound close and conscious of each other, but I visited eight churches on my journey between the two, and the town of Aylsham also sits between them. Around here, pretty villages huddle in the dips, and roads obey the old medieval strip field plan system, cutting back at dog leg angles for no apparent reason. It was a journey through a crazy lattice of angled and high-hedged lanes, and I was thankful for my ordnance survey map. At last I came into Tuttington, a compact, pretty village with flint cottages and houses with Flemish gables. The round-towered church of St Peter and St Paul is tucked fairly tightly behind a large 17th Century house. Unlike Thurgarton, I have been a regular visitor to Tuttington church over the years. It is a church I like a lot. Not being as remote, it is one that easily draws me into its orbit if I am passing close by, and I found my name six times in the visitors book.

Like Thurgarton, Tuttington has an exceptionally fine collection of medieval bench ends. They are a bit battered, but the damage is as likely to be the rough and tumble of the centuries as much as any form of iconoclasm. Among them, a grinning wild man with a club creeps up on a dragon, a woman churns butter, a man beats on a tambour, and, curiously, a woman allows her basket to be rifled by wild animals, one of them a fox. There is an elephant and castle, a grinning face peeping out of the castle. There's a man playing a lute, and another curiosity, a man who appears to be feeding a gryphon - or is it eating him?

Perhaps some of these subjects sound familiar, and for me on this journey the most striking thing about them is that they appear to be by the same hand as the bench ends at Thurgarton. The subjects have some similarities, the most memorable being the man creeping up on a dragon and the elephant and castle. Here too, the man with the gryphon may be part of a sequence in which this one is followed by the gryphon holding the man's head at Thurgarton. Intriguingly, this suggests the possibility that they might all have been in the same church originally. Or are they not by the same hand at all, but simply one 15th Century parish carpenter's clever copies of those of a nearby church?

Simon Knott, May 2018