Cawston has certainly felt the effects of the "winds of change" which have had an effect on so much of the 20th century. This has brought increased variety to all aspects of our lives and as the poet William Cowper wrote two centuries ago, "Variety's the very spice of life".

We have taken a brief look at the "ever-rolling stream" of time passing through our village and in such an account as this. there is little room for sentiment. But we are surrounded by reminders of the past, and it is no bad thing to stand and stare occasionally.

Minutes spent in meditation are rarely wasted. We see the flow of traffic round the new roundabout on the Holt-Norwich road and can compare it with the slow progress of the great flocks of sheep in that same place two centuries ago at the August fair.

We see the Old Mill at Sygate, its ruined walls standing sentinel over an area where the ploughmen of old dragged a plough to the Church and where more recently our ancestors laid a railway and removed it less than a century later.

From Eastgate we can look out at night and see the glow of the lights of Norwich, a reminder of how the flames of war lit up the darkened city over fifty years ago.

We see our great Church of St. Agnes and our Chapels, where we worship God as our forbears have done before us and if we stand by the churchyard gate on an evening in spring, when the trees are massed with blossom, we may hear, above the background sounds of cars, lawn-mowers and playing children, the song of a thrush in the rectory garden.

Then we can echo the words of our Norfolk writer, George Borrow, "Life is very sweet brother".

Despite the problems of our times, there is peace and beauty to be found in our village. Long may it continue to be so, as the every-rolling stream of time flows on.

We would like to thank Mr. John Kett for his contribution to the above account of our village. (May 1993)