A couple of miles north of Hinxton, Wittlesford is squeezed between the M11, the A505, the Cambridge to London railway line and a paper mill. It manages, however, to preserve an air of not knowing that it is thus sandwiched, and it possesses a fine little church, one that has been almost continuously changed and added to since Norman times. The exterior walls, presumably once plastered, now show long-ago altered roof lines, blocked windows and doors.

And best of all, high on the tower, a large relief carving of a sheela na gig, a naked, grinning woman, thighs spread wide, her vagina deeply carved, inviting a "human-headed male animal to mate with her.

I love these brazen, no-hold-barred images of the pre-Christian celebration of sex. I love the fact that generations of po-faced, perverted priests preached their sad, distorted hatred of anything sexual beneath her impious smile. That she outlasted most of the sadistic imagery of the religion that attempted to destroy the simple joy of sex, with the female and her sexuality being celebrated rather than reviled.

Whittlesford shows a couple of other refreshing examples of CofE flexibility. Being a Baptist, Ebenezer Hollick (died 1828), whose family built the nearby mill house in 1763, was buried outside the churchyard. But now the giant urn that marks his grave has been included in the churchyard.

And in the 1920s, the "non-conformists" who ran Spicers paper mill a mile or so from the village, helped the parish restore the church.

It's a wonderful mixture -- bits of alabaster from a long-vanished reredos, graffiti scratched near the pulpit presumably during some tedious sermon, a great iron-bound chest.