I had a little wander through Cockley Cley yesterday, en route to Oxburgh Hall, and here’s what The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of English Placenames had to say about it.

Cockley Cley, Norfolk. Claia in Domesday Book, Cochkleye in 1324. Clay, clayey soil. The additional Cockley is obscure, perhaps it is a plural noun meaning cock wood, wood frequented by wild birds.

And that is about as far as anyone else has got with working out the name origin. The Cockley bit might have been otherwise dropped over time, but there’s another Cley in Norfolk, so perhaps a differentiation made things easier.

There has been a church here since probably around the twelfth to thirteenth centuries (and perhaps there was another building from before that), and most of the current exterior dates to that period, albeit with some restorations during the nineteenth century. The roof was also replaced during this time and the interior was refitted, all under the supervision of Richard Phipson.

The east end of the church, and the neat and tidy churchyard.

The south porch is a more recent addition, dating from the late nineteenth century, when the interior was also altered and Victorianised.

A somewhat less than ideal situation developed for the church in August 1991, when the tower fell down. It did though give archaeologists a chance to look in-depth at the stone which had been used in the tower, and they found numerous pieces with masons marks on them.

There are some photos of what the tower looked like, including one just after it fell down, at https://www.roundtowers.org.uk/cockley-cley-all-saints/. In fairness to the Victorian restoration, it was concluded after an investigation that the tower hadn’t been touched during those works, so this wasn’t anything they’d fiddled about with.

The interior of the church wasn’t open, but by all accounts, it’s quite a Victorian interior inside and not much pre-dates that.