Our fifth clue took us to St Mary’s Church, a Grade II listed building that has stood at the heart of Bexley for centuries. More precisely, it led us to the medieval lych-gate at the church’s western entrance.

The opening line points to the church’s earliest arrangement. Its original stone floor was bare, with benches fixed around the outer walls for the elderly and infirm — giving rise to the phrase “gone to the wall”.

From there, the clue draws the eye upwards to the unusual two-storey spire: the “two-tiered cap” that rises above the church. This rare feature, shared by only one other church in Kent, remains something of a mystery, with historians and architects still unsure why it was built in such an unusual form.

The line “Norman by birth, yet Saxon in guide” reaches further back into the church’s history. The Domesday Survey of 1086 records a “church in Bixle”: a wooden Saxon structure later replaced by the Normans in around 1100.

Our “Master of Arts” is William Morris, the leading figure of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who lived nearby at the Red House in Bexleyheath. His connection to St Mary’s is a personal one: his daughter was christened there.

Finally, the clue brings us back beneath the lych-gate itself. The word “lych” coming from the Old English “lic”, meaning corpse, so a lych-gate was, quite literally, a corpse-gate. Under medieval church law, a body could not be consecrated until the priest arrived to perform the first rites, so the body and mourners would wait beneath the gate before entering the churchyard.

And that is where the answer was hiding: in plain sight, for anyone who remembered to look UP as they passed through!  A slightly trickier clue — but the best is yet to come.