To cut a dull story short, I've been here loads of times, and the church is always locked. There's no keyholder notice, though the church website claims there is. Roughly seventy per cent of the churches of East Anglia are open every day, and most of the rest are accessible via a keyholder notice. Actually, the percentages are skewed, because in some places pretty much all the churches are locked - the Thetford area, the Lowestoft area - while in others, all the churches are open - south Cambridgeshire, north Norfolk, east Suffolk, north Essex. You can set off from Harwich, head west, and not hit a locked church until you are well into Bedfordshire. What have the parishioners of Methwold done to deserve such an unwelcoming parish church? Did they vandalise it? Did they steal from it? Perhaps they did.

The church is grand, magnificent in its way, despite the barren municipal bowling green of a churchyard. The most striking feature, of course, is that tower, with the octagonal top stage and the spire rising 120 feet above ground level. It is a grand, late perpendicular moment which would grace any urban church, and yet here it is in the Breckland. And to the east, that beautiful, grand sanctus bell turret on the clerestory above the south aisle. It is magnificent. Perhaps we do not need to see inside. Perhaps the exterior is enough. And yet, my friend John Vigar has been inside, and what he found there appears to be of some interest. Above all, so to speak, the angel roof, which is so similar to that at neighbouring Hockwold that they must be by the same workshop and be roughly contemporary, which is to say in the 1530s, shortly before such things became anathema, and were entirely proscribed. Wonderful stuff, as are the corbels, one of a man playing the bagpipes. Unlike the people of Methwold, John has seen them, and you too can see them below.