All Saints Church, Great Melton The long quiet lanes of rural mid-Norfolk hold few surprises, but to come around the corner and meet the twin 15th Century towers of the Great Melton churches in their wide, tidy churchyard is one of them. The southerly tower is of the ruined St Mary, the other of All Saints, the working church, but their stories are slightly complicated, because until the late 19th Century it was St Mary that was the working church and All Saints was almost derelict. The decision was made to consolidate the two and to build a bigger church than St Mary against the tower of All Saints. In the 1880s St Mary was demolished and the materials used to rebuild All Saints on the scale we now see it. The architect was Joseph Pearce, and the style was a spare, even stern Gothic perhaps more typical of domestic buildings in that decade. The walls are curiously high for the length of the church, although this is broken up on the north side by a transept which houses the organ. You step into a warm welcoming interior that inevitably feels narrow and perhaps a bit cluttered thanks to the height of the nave in proportion to its width. Almost everything is of the 1880s and not much is from after, so this is a time capsule of a kind. What does come later is some good 20th Century glass on the south side of the nave. St Fursey is the 1960s work of Goddard & Gibbs, and he stands with animals at his feet and birds flying in the air around him. He is set in clear glass, a precedence set by the window to the east of him. This is older, by Horace Wilkinson in 1929, and depicts St Walstan holding his scythe and coronet with a pair of bullocks seated at his feet. You are looking for a Stickoflage cache cunningly hidden in tree Cache place with kind permission from Revd. Derek McClean
If you would like to add to the Church Micro series yourself then please look here http://churchmicro.co.uk/
There is also a Church Micro Stats & Information page that can be found at http://www.15ddv.me.uk/geo/cm/index.html