Churches

St Ethelbert, Thurton

First appeared in Let's Talk! Norfolk, September 2004

It's a mystery few people will find, one that perhaps deserves to be better known. Where can you find a lobster at the top of a Norfolk hill? And why is it there?

It's quite a hill by Norfolk standards. About halfway between Norwich and Beccles, the road sweeps down to a junction, then climbs again on its way towards Suffolk . If you can safely look to your right as the climb begins, you may see a little old church on the hilltop.

St Ethelbert's stands in its pretty churchyard by a sandy lane that was the main Norwich road before the busy A146 was built. It is an ancient meeting place that may have been a religious site long before Christianity came to East Anglia.

The thick, leaning walls of the simple, single-cell building betray its age. The small, slender tower looks so grafted-on, you would imagine it to be Victorian. In fact, it was added in the 16th century, but the integrated nave and chancel were already centuries old by then.

You enter by a lovely little doorway, curved and carved in the classic 12th-century style commonly known as Norman. Markings on the stonework look, and may be, considerably older.

The windows are interesting. Most are in very simple Early English (broadly, 13th century) form: those that were apparently added in about 1350 are also in the earlier style.

The Holy Trinity - a rare survival in 15th-century English glass

The varied glass contains several fragments collected (or looted, depending how you look at it) from French or Flemish sources. There are several rather gawdy scenes by Robert Allen (1745-1835), artist and manager at the former porcelain factory in Lowestoft .

Most excitingly, there is a rare 15th-century English Trinity - God the Father, bearded, crowned and enthroned, with the crucified Christ at his knee and a dove representing the Holy Spirit. This glass seems too fine for this little church, where it could scarcely have survived the puritan wrecking spree of the 17th century. It may have come from the nearby former Langley Abbey.

But what about that lovely lobster? It's more likely, in fact, to be a crayfish, since it swims in the river water at the feet of a giant St Christopher, now largely faded away. The mythical saint, ferrying the Christ child on his shoulder, was painted in the 15th century in his traditional place on the north wall, opposite the entrance.

Intriguingly, the decaying plaster reveals a fragment of an earlier painting of a biblical or saintly scene: the Christopher was painted over it.