This church is an example of a cruciform round tower church. Grade II* listed, the church tower has bands of carstone decoration which usually means it is a Saxon building, so the tower is probably early C11th and there was a church here before this date. On top of the Saxon work is an octagonal bell chamber of at least early C14th, built before the fashion for the flushwork we see in later C14th church towers around Norfolk took hold, and containing a ring of six bells hung for ringing in the full-circle English style. The west end is also C11th with a C13th Perpendicular nave and chancel details, Decorated north and south transepts and late C19th south porch. The church is built of flint with stone dressings with a slated roof; the base of the tower, as mentioned, has carstone decoration and the quoins at the north-west corner of the nave are also of carstone.
The tower has a Perpendicular west door, round headed lancets, an octagonal belfry stage c.1300 with switch tracery and two-light Decorated belfry windows, internally a one-step Norman tower arch opens into the church and forms a backdrop to the Victorian font with its 20th century Perpendicular font cover. The bowl is inscribed 'Except a man / be born of water / and of the Spirit, / he cannot / enter into / the kingdom / of GOD' The eighth side carries the trefoil of the trinity.
The three bay nave with two north and two south three-light windows, the central light in each for each of the Evangelists, the outer panes a combination of symmetrical patterns, symbols and small scenes, some of the best late 19th century glass in Norfolk the work of William Wailes. The blocked and partially cut down two-light Perpendicular windows to the east nave bay and the east nave gable suggest a removed clerestorey. This mix of styles, Perpendicular cutting through Decorated, would suggest a rebuild at the time of, or shortly after, the Black Death, possibly following some destructive event in the church history or an abandoned earlier rebuild resumed after the plague.
The chancel has two north and south Decorated three-light windows, and a remodelled Perpendicular east window, a sedilia, a piscina and a north aumbry recess. There's a filled in Perpendicular north window and a Perpendicular south priest's door. The roof has plaster decoration of painted angels and a repeating wreath motif by Sir Ninian Comper dating from 1912. Also by Comper is the alabaster reredos with figures “at once human and unworldly, crisp and alive. The central crucifixion with the Blessed Virgin and St John is flanked by St George dispatching a dragon, St Swithin with his swan, St Helen with the true cross, and St Edmund with a broodily prowling wolf.” The chancel arch is spanned by a great rood, which curiously has a small shield in the middle referring to the Malay states, possibly a memorial to someone who died in the Far East in the Second World War, but it may be older and so may originally have come from elsewhere. On the north wall are two superimposed sections of a C16th Renaissance wall tomb, both Elizabethan, the upper part coloured. The glass throughout is 1868-1875 in an archaic 1840s style.
The south transept has two straight-headed east and west windows, and a south three-light reticulated Decorated window with some finer small treacery inside the reticulation. The north transept has two two-light Decorated east windows and a three-light Decorated north window with reticulation and quatrefoils. The transept and chancel arches both seem to be Perpendicular which also places them at c1370-80, some 30 years after the Black Death swept through Europe. Also in the south transept are two arched recesses in the south wall and a piscina in the east wall. The transept screen from the south side is a 1914-1918 war memorial, painted white and lettered. The chapel it screens is an empty space containing a tomb recess, an altar with a modern reredos in the style of a Flemish painting, and a statue of St Thomas. The screen panels are painted with a sequence of Saints, very much 1920s Anglo-Catholic in style. They depict, from left to right, St Remigius, St Cuthlac, St Etheldreda, St Andrew, St Thomas, St Withburga, St Walstan – digging with a spade - and St Felix.
The ringing chamber is reached by a stone stairway going a quarter way round the tower then a timber stair ending up in the middle of the room. There is a pointed-top doorway cut through the east tower wall into the organ loft and gallery and a row of post-holes from an old pre-existing staircase which ran up the inside of the tower.
The following is a table extracted from Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers showing the weights in kg, and the sounding notes of the bells.
Bell Weight Note Dated Founder
1 204.57 E 1890 John Taylor & Co
2 229.97 D 1890 John Taylor & Co
3 275.33 C 1890 John Taylor & Co
4 345.69 B 1890 John Taylor & Co
5 449.06 A 1890 John Taylor & Co
6 616.89 G 1890 John Taylor & Co
John Taylor & Co cast bells at the Loughborough foundry. John was the then founder in a long line of Taylors beginning with Robert in 1786, the foundry having been started by Joseph Eayre in 1735. The foundry is still working and from May 2017 will be the only bell foundry working in the UK, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is closing after over 250 years in Whitechapel.
Words from British Listed Buildings, Simon Knott's Norfolk Churches and Pevsner's Norfolk 2 Buildings with amendments from own on site observations.
Coordinates are for the south porch entrance.