The villages out here run into each other; West Lynn straggles out, the houses get pleasanter and eventually become Clenchwarton.

Compared with some of the exotica around here, St Margaret is refreshingly conventional - pretty much all of a late 14th/early 15th century piece, and no transepts, separate tower or modern chancel in sight. A mixture of carstone and flint, the church is very attractive; and slightly ramshackle, as if made out of chocolate chip cookies.

This is another locked church with a keyholder, but they are so rarely in on Saturday mornings that I didn’t bother; you can see almost everything there is to see through the clear glass windows of the nave, and it is low church Victorian inside, the diametrical opposite of its West Lynn neighbour. Apart from the garish glass in the east window, it looked almost non-conformist in character.

I would have liked to have seen the memorial that Mortlock notes, to Francis Forster, 1741: When the terrible inundation Feb 16 1735 threatened the destruction of this whole Level, He with unshaken resolution, when all around him droop'd under their misery, opposed the Flood, repaired the broken ramparts, and sav'd the land from that fatal ruin with which the next assault must have overwhelm'd it.

Simon Knott, July 2005