I’m not a great reader of newspapers, but if ever I buy one of those big weekend ones, they always seem to contain a horror story about someone who moves from the noise and dirt of London or Birmingham to a rural idyll, only to find themselves shunned as an outsider by the natives. Not only does the village post office not sell carpaccio, they get stonewalled in the village pub. It’s not a price worth paying for decent schools. Within six months, they’re packing the Range Rover and hightailing it back to the big city, relieved to return to civilisation.

Some English counties do not accept incomers easily. I think Suffolk does, partly because the people are so easy-going. Mind you, this may change as more and more villages, especially on the coast, fall victim to second-home owners. New arrivals add to the economy and cultural life of a village, but nobody wants to live beside an empty cottage for ten months of the year.

I am not from Suffolk originally, but certainly feel as if I belong here. It was one of the proudest moments of my life when the local radio station described me as an ambassador for the county. But when I’m out on the western border, I get a yearning that reaches me nowhere else; the call for home.

I am Cambridgeshire-born and bred; for generations, my family were fen men and women, outlaws and vagabonds before the great draining, survivors and schemers after it. Culturally and politically, the Fens have always been a place apart, the South Armagh of England.

The strange landscape of my ancestors haunts me now. I grew up in the bustle of the city of Cambridge, but my thoughts still turn north of it to the flat land. And south-east of the Fens, the graveyards of the Cambridgeshire/Suffolk border are full of my mother’s maiden name.

Kentford is about as close to Cambridgeshire as you can get; to the north of the churchyard, the busy A14 marks the border. Kennet station, 300 metres away, is in Cambridgeshire. Often along this border, adjoining parish centres merge, as if ignoring the vagaries of Saxon bureaucrats; in their names, Kentford and Kennet reveal themselves as two parts of the same whole.

As with all the Newmarket hinterland, Kentford looks to Cambridge more than it does to Ipswich and Norwich. For two centuries, Cambridge was the poor cousin of the three, but the high-tech developments of the last twenty years have completely reversed this, and houses around here cost twice as much as they do in east Suffolk or south Norfolk. More than that, this area is wooded, and hilly; a landscape that seems to stop at the border. Basically, Suffolk is prettier than Cambridgeshire.

At one time, Kentford high street was the main road from Cambridge to Ipswich, Norwich and the seaside. If you grew up in the sixties and seventies like I did, and lived so far from the sea, you’ll know that you didn’t get to see it very often. I remember summer mornings, still cold from the hour, the excited coach escaping the sleepy city, the whole pleasure of the day ahead contained in it. I remember Kentford as the first hill we reached, as if entering a foreign country. You’d know for certain now what a wonderful day it was going to be.

Perhaps because of this, the sun is shining whenever I visit Kentford, as if a powerful memory lingers on, like a charge or a charm. Perhaps the sun always shines in Kentford.

Today, the village is completely bypassed, but St Mary still sits at the top of the hill in the little graveyard. There is a pub a bit further east, and a shop along the road to Moulton. With the station and A14 nearby, it’s no surprise that this is increasingly a commuter village, but it still seems to have a considerable life of its own. I’m very fond of it; today, Kentford is often still the start of a journey for me, if I take my bike on the train to Kennet, and spend the long day cycling through the lanes back to the coast. There is still an excitement.

St Mary is not a big church, and its tight hilltop graveyard means that you could easily miss it if you were driving through. Best not to drive; medieval Suffolk was not designed for cars.

Just inside the church gate, there is a fine early 18^th century grave, and in general a genealogist would spend a happy hour here. This is just as well, because I'm afraid that the church is kept locked.

There used to be a keyholder here. A few summers ago, I remember knocking on his door at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning for it. Most people would be up at this time; but here in Kentford, the keyholder was the village pub. I think they expected people to ask for the key when the pub was open, and not get the landlord out of bed and to the door in his dressing gown and slippers. He was remarkably polite about it under the circumstances.

As Mortlock observes, the building is largely 14th century; its rather ideosyncratic appearance is a result of a considerable 18th century renovation. It has been left a largely lovely building, attractive in an otherwise fairly workmanlike village.

There is an excellent reason why you should want to get inside St Mary. It has one of the few surviving medieval wall-paintings in East Anglia of the Three Living and the Three Dead. This is directly opposite the south doorway, where you’d expect a St Christopher, and is one of the more delightfully ghoulish pre-Reformation images. Three hunting courtiers encounter a trio of skeletons in the woods; As I am so you shall be, observes the first. Rich and poor come to the same end, points out the second. Just in case there is any doubt, no one escapes, declaims the third.

This church used to have other wall paintings, but all have now been plastered over, awaiting a kinder, gentler age when money is available for the restoration of such things, and not just for the bombing of Iraq. Otherwise, you'll delight in the lovely brick floor, in what is a largely typical Victorian rural interior.

Shortly after this entry first appeared, I received an extremely encouraging e-mail from a member of the parish. Sue Prigg is the Parish Clerk, and tells me that Kentford church was almost lost to us. However, an energetic new Rector, Steven Mitchell, has arrived in the Benefice, and is already increasing congregation numbers in each of his five parishes. Kentford had sunk about as low as it is possible to go without actually disappearing from sight; the last PCC had given up eight years ago, and the congregation had fallen to zero. The church was closed for a year, pending the possibility of redundancy.

The garden of faith is flowering again at Kentford, but the chance of redundancy still exists. The people in the parish are now working hard to make survival a proposition. Sue tells me that they are now up to two service a month, evensong on the first Sunday and morning communion on the third. They are desperate for an organist; at present, the Rector himself plays! The congregation is up to about twenty people, and Sue is busy organising fund-raising events, tracking down the old parish bank accounts, and generally giving this pretty little church a fighting chance.

I have told her that I very much hope Kentford parish recognises that its church building is the engine house of a gathered faith - it would be wonderful to see Kentford church move towards a position where it was open during the day, and people could be encouraged to stop a while, for rest and reflection. Churches where this happens find it can be a way to grow their congregations; after all, some people may come back on Sunday.

And, according to ChurchWatch, a locked church is twice as likely to be broken into as an unlocked one, twice as likely to be vandalised, and even slightly more likely to have something stolen from it.

But there’s more to it than that, of course. A locked church is a dead church, both spiritually and culturally. People who no longer have the touchstone of an open church have their faith privatised, however strong it is. Those without faith have no access to it. At Kentford, there is a chance for a Church to pull back from the brink, and for a building to play its part in being the body of Christ to the people of God.

St Mary, Kentford, is in the village high street, easily reached directly from the A14 if heading west, otherwise found from Newmarket town centre. At present, it is kept locked - but who knows what may happen now that the Faith has returned?

There is an article about Kentford by Sue Prigg on the 22 villages website.

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