This is one of Norfolk's most secretive churches, for although it is not far from one of the country lanes that thread up the Upper Wensum Valley between Fakenham and Dereham, it is hidden in its little churchyard among the fields, and I do not think you would come across it by accident. And it is a small church, for the chancel was lost at some point between a drawing made in 1781 and Ladbroke's engraving in the 1820s. Stoically, the parish filled in the gaping chancel arch, and there is no east window. The tower had also been lowered in the late 18th Century, perhaps even at the same time, and capped with a red brick parapet. The church has a curiously geometric feel to it, as if made with a child's building blocks, a cuboid and a cylinder perhaps, a toy church. The surprise on entering the little north porch is a splendid Norman doorway, and this of course reveals the true age of the church. It is unlikely that anything significant was done to the church after its 12th Century rebuilding other than the insertion of windows and the reparations we have already mentioned.

This is one of an increasing number of Norfolk churches with a time lock on the door, meaning that it can be open from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon without the need for anyone to come and unlock and lock it. You step into an interior which is perhaps much as you might expect, a plain and simple, well-kept and obviously much-loved space. The altar is backed by one of those old-fashioned curtain screens it is always pleasing to come across and what remains of a central tabernacle, suggesting that this church was once militantly Anglo-Catholic. To the north of it is the church's one spectacular survival, a tall cusped 15th Century image niche which might once have flanked the chancel arch but which I suspect was reset here after being rescued from the rubble of the chancel. The great curiosity of the church is tucked behind the south door. This is one of Norfolk's most idiosyncratic fonts. It is hard to date it, or even to see if it has always been a font. Pevsner gives a detailed description of its various component parts, including a brick plinth, the base of a 13th Century font and stones from a 15th Century cross, but this doesn't seem to coincide too closely with reality. If you saw it in a large church or cathedral your immediate impression might be that it was a holy water stoup.

The church has only one memorial, and it is to one of the thousands of boys who died of disease in South Africa during the Boer War. Edwin Neal of Worthingwas twenty-four years old when he died of dysentery in 1900, while on active service as a volunteer of the 2nd Vol Company of the Norfolk Regt. Volunteers were the cannon fodder of Empire in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, an attitude that the experience of the First World War would change for ever. Incidentally, it is remarkable to think that the European carving up of Africa took less than a century, but it had an incalculable effect on world politics that still resonates and has so many consequences today.

Simon Knott, June 2023

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