You climb the steep path from the road to this neat, trim little round-towered church just to the south of Sheringham. I first came here in the summer of 2005, and I was a bit disappointed to find it the only locked church of eighteen that I visited that day. A sign in the porch suggested that I contact a PCC member, which I thought was rather unwelcoming. I said as much on the first entry for Aylmerton, making some wisecrack remark about how their congregation was probably so big on a Sunday that they just couldn't take the risk of anyone new experiencing a sense of the numinous inside and being moved to join them.

This was terribly flippant of me, of course, and the PCC were a bit upset. Under the circumstances, they were very pleasant when they contacted me to say so. The same week I had received a scorching e-mail from the private secretary of the Bishop of East Anglia telling me in no uncertain terms what he thought of another entry on the site, so it was nice to receive a charming message from Professor Michael Balls, churchwarden of Aylmerton, apologising that I had found the church locked, and explaining exactly why. They had just suffered a serious and expensive act of vandalism involving the water supply to the church. They were really trying hard to find ways of making St John the Baptist accessible, and Professor Balls even complimented me on my photographs. He invited me to come and have another look, an invitation that I will try to take up this Spring. I really look forward to seeing inside.

On my first visit I had only been able to explore the graveyard.There are a couple of interesting 18th century headstones, including one with a skull, a coffin and a snake biting its tail, the symbol of eternity. A 19th century gravestone is for an honest inoffensive friend - Honest is good, but I'm not sure that I'd want to go through eternity with the tag inoffensive - you can imagine all the other souls in purgatory nudging each other, pointing and saying "look, you see him? He's inoffensive..."

The top part of the tower was rebuilt in the first decade of the 20th century, when the east window glass was also put in place. There were some busy restorations in the 1860s and 1870s, and the font is an unfortunate replacement of this time, but there is much that is medieval surviving, including a delicate sedilia and piscina. There are the bones of a rood screen, and the pulpit is an elegant wineglass.

Both altars are rather curious, one made up of strapwork and the other with a roundel as a reredos. I know all this because Peter Stephens has already been inside, and he took the photos that you see at the bottom of this page.

Simon Knott, September 2005 (updated March 2006)