The parish of Gayton Thorpe lies in western Norfolk roughly 8 miles northwest of the market town of Swaffham. The hamlet, for there is no village as such, lies just under a mile south of the B1145 road which cuts across the county from King's Lynn to Reepham. Gayton Thopre is something of a deserted village, a mere grouping of farms and cottages around a crossroads where two sections are unsurfaced lanes. This tiny place is a mere adjunct to its larger neighbour, Gayton, and the parish is dominated by arable farming, so much so that early gazetteers place almost 85% of the parish acreage set to arable land. Both Gayton Thorpe and Gayton lie at the base of the low ridge formed by underlying chalk, their own ground sloping gently across marshy terrain towards the Wash coast and the port of King's Lynn.

St Mary's church sits just south of the notional centre of Gayton Thorpe accessed along one of the roughly surfaced tracks that lead away from the duck-pond. The presence of a round tower in Norfolk is usually indicative of an early church and in this case St Mary does not disappoint, Pevsner points to the two-light bell-openings as being Norman Romanesque and 12th century in origin, below them, however, the lancet window shows the somewhat later Early English style. The main body of the church is, however, later still, the chancel with its intersecting tracery is in the Decorated style and given a tentative date of c1300 whilst the nave is in the later 14th century style of the Perpendicular, albeit it does show quoins of the local carrstone at its western end indicating a rebuild of that date of an earlier nave. Restoration came late to St Mary being completed in 1900 and not making many significant changes to the overall fabric. From the triangular area holding the duck-pond a gravelled track heads southeast the hundred metres or so to a parking area outside an open and uncluttered churchyard with no obstacles for the photographer.