Long Melford is the most self-important of Suffolk villages, and Holy Trinity is the most self-important of Suffolk churches. Although, as an American tourist that I made this observation to replied, it has a lot to be self-important about.

Self-importance is as self-importance does - Holy Trinity from the new graveyard. (I stole this picture from the guide because it is better than mine. I'll replace it as soon as I've taken another - promise. The guidebook is excellent, by the way, and I thoroughly recommend it, a bargain at £1.50)

The church hides at one end of the village beyond the green, and if you take the usual road to it then you do not see its full length until you are within 50 metres. This makes it one of the most dramatic approaches to a Suffolk church. To see the church at length it is necessary to turn right and walk down to the new graveyard. The effect of the nave and chancel and their clerestory is stunning. The tower is stately, but does not seem to sit too well with the rest of the building.

The Lady chapel from the east. The roofline cuts through the east window view. An ill-fitting extension, or a marvel of late perpendicular?

What it does have, however, is something rather extraordinary. Beyond the point where the chancel should make a dramatic full-stop, there is another building, attached and yet separate. And yet it is clearly contemporary, and was built shortly after the nave and chancel.

It is Holy Trinity's famous Lady chapel, and the inscription that goes right the way around this splendid church goes around the Lady chapel as well. The whole piece was almost certainly the work of one architect, who achieved great things as well on a much smaller canvas at nearby Denston.

There is one at Lavenham as well. If we can ignore it, then we see at once that this is a very tasteful building, rather less provincial than almost any other Suffolk church. It is a major statement of rich patronage.

It is also a result of an extraordinary survival. The windows in the north aisle are full of Suffolk's largest collection of medieval glass. It is a collection as varied as it is rich, but together makes a major statement about the family, and the money, that built this church.

They were the Cloptons, and we see them and the families and their patron saints along the range of the north wall. It is not all in its original place. It was scattered, according to Victorian taste, throughout the church.

Some of the figures were made up of pieces of other figures. Over the last ten years the collection has been painstakingly brought together in the north aisle as correctly as possible.

How did so much survive? The Cloptons were a very wealthy family. One must presume that they were influential enough in Long Melford to ensure that the memorials to their ancestors survived, as did their chantry chapel, and, incredibly, the litany of 'ora pro anima's that encircle the building. Come Reformation, come puritanism, come Victorian restoration, no one messed with the Cloptons. You can see their home, Kentwell Hall from the green, and another great house, Melford Hall, lies to the east. The Cordells lived there.

Today, this church receives some considerable financial support from the Clopton family in America, and the Clopton chapel was restored at their expense. This is a stunning little room at the top of the north aisle.

Elizabeth Talbot, Duchess of Norfolk - piety and power. (This photograph copyright of and thanks to Aidan Semmens)

Inside, the Cloptons had a chantry altar, and still have a fine view of the high altar. Of course, no one had a fine view of the Cloptons. On the walls are handwritten devotional verses, amazing survivals again. In the window, a rare representation of the crucifixion as a lily.

The illusion of massiveness from the outside is a familiar one from Lavenham, Southwold and Eye. This sleight of hand is less necessary at Holy Trinity, since it is actually very big. Indeed, the chancel itself is barely discernable as such: the clerestory continues into it, and the Clopton chapel foreshortens the north aisle out of line with the roodscreen, of which little survives here anyway. But there is a marvellous Victorian reredos, certainly the best of the period in Suffolk.

The south aisle ends at the vestry, through which one might enter the Lady chapel. Note here the very remarkable bench from Seville cathedral. But being members of the public, we must go outside and re-enter the building further east.

An illusion of massiveness betrayed - the nave and chancel at Long Melford.

For many years, it served as the village school, and an early 19th century times tables square is still to be found on the wall. Fragments of medieval glass punctuate the windows. The building is now like nothing so much as a small Anglican church with an ambulatory. Despite everything that has been thrown at it, it is still very beautiful.

Holy Trinity is undoubtedly the grandest building in the county of Suffolk, even if it isn't quite the finest church. It is a building that is constantly reinventing itself, and to see it today we see what is largely a monument to post-war intellectual Anglican taste.

Apart from a couple of hideous Victorian windows, everything here is very reassuring, an illusion of Anglican continuity from St Augustine to the present day.

Of course, we know this to be false, and, as always, history is written by the victors.

But here it is possible also, if one stands still for a moment and avoids the hideous shop, to see the English church at perhaps its highest moment. The awe and wonder of the late medieval period are lifted high here, as sunlight pours in through the intricate lightly stained windows.

The Cloptons who built this church were the kind of proto-capitalists that made the Reformation inevitable, but by a stroke of irony they have ensured that this tremendous building remains as a text, as evidence of Catholic liturgy and practice in late-medieval Suffolk. Their neighbours at Denston have left us a similar document.

I like this church a good deal, but I cannot love it. It does not have the mystical presence in its community that we will find at Eye and Southwold, or the sense of the numinous we encounter at Blythburgh or Hessett. Several generations of my wife's family are buried in the graveyard here. But I fear this building overshadows them, as self-important as the village it stands in.

And Long Melford is not really a village at all. It is a suburb of Sudbury, barely a field separating them, and Melford High Street, which leads from Holy Trinity, will become Melford Road and then North Street in Sudbury, finishing at the foot of St Peter in the Market Square there. These churches were the testimony of communities that do not exist today, and the shop in the west end of Holy Trinity is as eloquent a statement of the late 20th century as the delicate and beautiful alabaster carving of the Adoration of The Magi was in its own day.

Please also see the entry for this church at Aidan Semmens' Sylly Suffolk.

You can also visit the Long Melford website, and you can visit Holy Trinity's own website, too.

You can also visit the entry for Holy Trinity at Dave Postle's Images of Churches and Buildings in Suffolk.

There is also an interesting article about cast-iron grave markers at Holy Trinity on the churchmouse website.

Holy Trinity, Long Melford, is to be found on the A134 Sudbury to Bury St Edmunds road. It is open every day. See MAP