We came here on one of those awful grey February days, when the cold and the damp penetrate your clothes, your skin, every aching muscle and most probably your soul. And we were not full of confidence. Postwick is quite literally the thin end of the wedge, the most westerly of a small group of churches that fan out from Norwich towards the coast that are infamous in church exploring circles for being kept locked. In practice, only a very small number of Norfolk churches are locked during the day, and a fraction of those are locked without a keyholder. The statistics are skewed by this group north of the Yare, south of the railway line.

Postwick does have keyholders, but they were both out. So we stood in the churchyard, in the drizzle, looking up miserably at the fortress-like walls. Mortlock is eloquent about the windows in the south wall, detecting the hand of a local mason in the Decorated tracery that is enthusiastic rather than skilled. He also mentions a marble pulpit set with stones pilfered from the Holy Land by a 19th century rector, which I would rather have liked to see. Instead, we made do with a mawkish memorial to another 19th century Rector's wife. It sits by the gate, and is very much in the late 1920s manner - if the date of her death in the 1890s reflects its construction, then it is extremely early for its style.

We had come here from Whitlingham and Bixley - as DD observed, first a depressing ruined church, then a depressing burnt-out church, now a depressing locked chuch. Ho hum. Postwick is probably a lovely little place. A mark of how close it is to Norwich is that it gives its name to the park-and-ride on this side of town; but here, away from the busy roads, the houses line narrow hilly lanes that wander down into the marshes. All very pretty on a summer day, I'm sure. But I was in no mood to enjoy it. Simon Knott, February 2005