shewhomust | Armchair travelling

Today has been enlivened by the sound of cars skidding on the hill outside: thankfully, no-one seems to have hit anything yet. So there'd be no prospect of going anywhere right now, even if we were not locked down. I distract myself with pictures of past travels.

On the last day of our holiday in Norfolk, as I wrote at the time (a year and a half ago), we saw the Bears onto their (Bittern Line) train at Sheringham, and then drove home by the scenic route via Cley. I thought we had explored Cley the previous day, but now our road took us through a completely different village. Suddenly, there was a church:

Well, of course there was a church. I ought to have known that there was more of Cley to see, since we hadn't previously found the church. But now here it was, very inviting in the late-afternoon sunlight, and we stopped for a look round.

Inside first: a big airy space, not as big as it has been (I'll come to that) but high, quite light, quite plainly furnished. And here's the other reason why the church should not have come as a surprise:

I had read, not so long before, a book about medieval church graffiti, and the church at Cley was one of those mentioned: it is particularly rich in scratched images of ships, apparently. The book warned that these could be hard to make out, and I thought as I read it that if I were in the location described I probably wouldn't be able to see anything - and this was, indeed, the only example I was able to make out (and even so I was very pleased to see it).

This would have been hard to miss, though:

I don't know anything about it, it just caught my eye. But there's a story to this little bird:

It's a white crowned sparrow, not a local species at all, but a rare North American visitor. One turned up in Cley in 2008, and visiting birders were invited to drop coins into a bucket in aid of the church restoration fund. The result was generous enough that the sparrow was remembered in the restored window.

The play of light and shadow here is a reminder that some things you gain from restoration, some things you lose. The ports along this stretch of the Norfolk coast are holiday territory now (try to look up the history of the Glaven ports and you are inundated with offers of cottages to rent) but in the Moddle Ages, before they silted up, they were busy and prosperous, and their churches were on a suitable scale. Now Cley church sits within the ruined shell of its former self, to entirely decorative effect:

A closer look at that roof:

Time to move on from the church to Cley's best lnown landmark, the windmill; the mill irself is a dauntingly fancy wedding venue, but it makes a good bachdrop for the lottle boats moored balow:

And since this was our last evening in Norfolk, we couldn't go home without finding our way to the beach - the expmnse of pebbles was a bit of a surprise!