Creeting St Mary

St Mary, Creeting St Mary

I huffed and puffed my way up the long, steep hill from Needham Market, climbing out of the Gipping Valley into High Suffolk. St Mary is visible for miles, a landmark on the A14, exposed on its round hill with pastures stretching below. Unlike Creeting St Peter, the village of Creeting St Mary is dead posh, and a huge Victorian gothic house sits directly opposite the churchyard gates. These gates are huge too, a good eight feet high. They were given as a memorial in the 1930s, and are something of a motif for this church, as we shall see.

St Mary from the east. Note the clumsy north aisle, and the grill on the east window.

I pushed my bike along the path that leads up to the church. Its aspect from this direction is most curious; the east end of the chancel is dwarfed by that of the north aisle beside it. This aisle was built in the 1870s.

The parish room, built beside the church. There are signs that it is still in use, which is more than you can say for the church.

It was an extension of an earlier transept, built to accomodate the parishioners of Creeting All Saints; their round-towered church, which shared a churchyard with St Mary, was destroyed in a storm in 1800. Nothing now remains of it, except a slightly flattish expanse above the slope of the hill.

Directly beside the north side of the churchyard is a 19th century parish room, built of Woolpit brick. There's one rather like it at Battisford, but that is now part of a private house; peering through the windows, I could see that this one still seems to be in public use.

Approaching the church, I began to notice the ugly metal grills disfiguring all the windows, the ones on the north side being particularly grim.

A horse regarded me balefully over a gap in the churchyard wall. This didn't feel like a very welcoming place, and the horse seemed to feel it too. There are massive brick buttresses to the west of the tower, and these, combined with the grills, make the church looks like a prison of some sort.

This impression is relieved for a moment by looking up at the pretty 19th century tower top, with its sentimental flushwork, and at the lovely modern Madonna and child in the medieval niche above the porch entrance.

But on approaching the porch, I discovered that the half doors in the outer arch were padlocked. This is really petty; stopping people getting into the church is one thing, but preventing travellers from resting on the benches in the porch? My goodness. If you vault over these doors (a thing easily done) you'll discover that the door beyond is securely locked, too.

Nice from this side.

The ancient Norman doorway beyond the locked gates. And a gorgeous holy water stoup, from the days when people used to be welcome in churches.

I met a rather belligerent Minister from this church at a Suffolk Historic Churches Trust 'do', a short while after first uplinking this account. After dismissing my site as 'rubbish' (hey, thanks!) he told me that the outer doors were kept locked to stop drug addicts using the porch, which makes Creeting St Mary sound a fun place to live.

All around are 'Alphadot' security stickers, and notices that 'all goods are security marked'. One particularly ugly sign on the main door says WARNING in bold letters at the top. It looks so much like a sign you'd see on the door of a particularly rough back-street newsagent, that I half expected to see another sign saying 'no more than three children at a time' underneath it. There is no evidence of any life, no suggestion that this is the heart of a faith community. I've no idea if this church is still in use for worship, or as anything other than a strongroom. Perhaps the congregation has decamped to the parish room.

Increasingly, I get the impression that churchyards are mainly used by a secular cult of the dead. They worship their ancestors' graves with vases of fresh flowers, but have no need of a church, no reason to participate in the Communion of all believers, or to pray for the souls of their loved ones. Is this harsh? Probably. But St Mary wasn't built just for Christenings, weddings and funerals, the so-called 'core business' of CofE PLC. Now, with its hideous grills and padlocks, St Mary struck me as one of the least hospitable of all the 550-odd Suffolk churches I have visited. And that locked porch is so petty.

St Mary, Creeting St Mary, is on the main road through the village north of the A14 at the Needham Market interchange. Don't even think of getting inside.