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St John
the Baptist, Aylmerton
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2011
was, I am told, the second warmest year on
record, but it was not the summer that
particularly contributed to that statistic. For
do you remember April, spring days heavy with the
merciless sun, the temperature well into the
eighties before the middle of the month, day
after day? And then, a damp, humid May boiled the
countryside into an outrageous green, the
hedgerows swelling into the narrow lanes, the
ground elder and angelica luminous in their
sprawling, not a patch of bare ground to be seen
anywhere. An old man in a village pub near Holt
told me it was like 1940, the first spring of the
Second World War. Summer was mild in
comparison, but then the hot days came back
until, in early October of all months, the
temperature soared up to the eighties again. How
could I resist taking my new bike up into the
north Norfolk lanes? I was in my element, with
the promise of more rides to come. But in fact
the weather would break within a week, and by the
time the clocks went back the trees were bare and
dripping with damp, the fields silvery with the
rime of the first frosts.
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I was
cycling from Cromer to Norwich, and one of my first goals
was St John the Baptist, Aylmerton. There were just two
churches left in north Norfolk that I had yet to see
inside, and this was one of them. 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. There wasn't even a keyholder notice. I complained
about this, as you'd expect. I received a charming e-mail
message from Professor Michael Balls, who was then the
churchwarden of Aylmerton (and, for your interest in
passing, also the father of the then-newly elected Labour
MP Edward Balls), apologising that I had found the church
locked, and explaining that they had just suffered a
serious and expensive act of vandalism involving the
water supply to the church. Since then, the church has
been opened every day, and I was pleased to know that
this parish is one of several now in the care of Allan
Barton, a long-time contact of mine.
You climb
the steep path from the road to this neat, trim little
round-towered church in its pretty village stretched
along the road just to the south of Sheringham. 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, and the interior has much of the feel of the
Anglo-catholic sentiments of the late 19th and early 20th
Century. But much that is medieval survives, 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, that in the chancel made up of strapwork
and the one in the south aisle with a roundel of
a Flemish madonna and child set in an art deco
reredos, for all the world like an
ecclesiological wireless set. Also art deco is
the war memorial, set oddly in the side of the
organ. 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..."
Not far off, a modern headstone has an elegant
scallop shell of St James set into it.
Leaving
the village, I headed south towards Aylmerton
Cross, a restored medieval preaching cross
standing at the junction with the road from
Metton to Gresham. A rough track going off here
shows that it was once a crossroads, and the old
track points, intriguingly, across the fields to
the holy shrine of Walsingham.
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Simon Knott, January 2012
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