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This pretty little church
sits in the meandering lanes to the north-east of
Ipswich, not particularly remote, but seeming so
in this rolling, high-hedged area. As often in
the Ipswich area, the tower is set on the south
side forming a porch, but being truncated and
wearing a red cap gives it a sense of the exotic,
especially when seen a sunny day from a distance,
a splash of terracotta among the rich greens. The
name Culpho appears to mean 'Cuwulf's hill',
Cuwulf being the name of a Saxon leader and Hoo,
Hoe or Ho being a fairly common placename ending
in East Anglia, the churches often set on a rise
like this one. The
body of the nave appears to be substantially
contemporary with the tower, so at the start of
the 14th Century but without aisles or
clerestories. The chancel, though obviously
rebuilt, seems conventional enough from outside,
but it creates a striking juxtaposition from
within as we will see. For many years this church
was kept locked, but on my most recent visit in
September 2021 I found it open, and judging by
the visitors book it is usually open daily.
You step under the tower
into the nave and the immediate impression is of
light and simplicity, an early 21st Century
restoration with modern furnishings giving the
church a character quite of its own. The chancel
arch is narrow and pointed, and rather hard to
date unless you know that the east end of the
church had been rebuilt at the start of the 17th
Century, and then the modern chancel came as a
complete rebuilding of the 1880s at the expense
of Robert Gurdon, first Baron Cranworth. Gurdon
himself lived at Letton Hall in Norfolk, and the
nearby parish church of Cranworth there is full
of Gurdon memorials. He restored St Botolph for
the workers on his estates here, - as his
memorial observes, he was always gracious and
kind to all his tenants - and this church
was intended for the poor of what was then a
remote and intensely rural parish.
As insignificant as this
little parish is, Culpho has one memorable claim
to fame. It was identified by Arthur Mee as one
of Suffolk's two 'Thankful Parishes', for which
there was no record of them losing any of their
young men to the horrors of the First World War.
Of the sixteen thousand-odd English parishes that
sent their boys off to fight, fewer than fifty
got them all back home again safely.
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