(Above) an old legend connects these towers with a local castle.

After a hurried lunch (roast lamb) a long drive along muddy roads, eventually arriving at a melancholy town. Four grand former banks facing each other at the intersection of a crossroads, assorted shops trailing off along the four roads, petering out into the countryside. Apart from a good second-hand bookshop everywhere was shut.

Helen B and I had made the journey to look at the porch of the church. A local legend recounts that it originally came from a nearby castle (long since torn down), and reassembled as a grand entrance to the north door of the church. Certainly the two round towers were not ecclesiastical architecture, and were not bonded with the rest of the porch.

Already the light was beginning to fade, and the damp silence of the afternoon created a mood of expectation - would the legendary porch be a portal to another time? In a way it was, as when we entered the church we found a stillness and a darkness that seemed palpably from another age. We also found something else…

In the north west corner of the building was the fourteenth century tomb of a knight, his life-size stone effigy lying on a decorated stone chest. In full armour (with a belt of medallions), feet resting on a lion, his left arm held a shield emblazoned with two leopards. The head rested on a huge helmet, the face looking out at us from a petrified balaclava of chain mail.

“It was his castle the two towers came from” said Helen B (making up history as she went along). “After his death they were brought here as a memorial.” In a reversal of the Sleeping Beauty story she leaned over the knight and kissed his stone lips, and then relapsed into giggles.