Pakenham

St Mary, Pakenham

For Suffolk, this is an unusual church. Its village is unique in England.

The church is unusual in several respects. Firstly, as you climb the beautiful rise of its graveyard, you will see immediately that it is cruciform, one of only a handful in the county. Others include Dallinghoo, Earl Stonham, Eyke and Oulton, although only the second of these survives in anything like its original form. Cruciform churches were frowned on by the reformers, not least because the use of transepts split the congregation up, and made it difficult to focus all the seating on the pulpit. Often, transepts were closed off, and even demolished.

You climb the hill up to this impressive building - it makes rather a change, don't you think?

At Pakenham, too, much is rebuilt. Both the north and south transepts are 19th century, early work of Samuel Teulon, in 1849. He rebuilt the south transept, but the north transept had been missing for many years.

But the west and south doors are fully Norman. The west door was once the main entrance to the church, and you can see clearly what access to places like Westhall must have once been like.

The tower is rather glamorous. It is four-square, but evolves into an octagonal turret. Seen from the churchyard of Thurston, less than a mile away, one is hard-pressed to decide if it is a church or a castle.

Above: Teulon's stair turret.

Left: the south side of the chancel - a touch morbid, perhaps?

Since Teulon's time, entrance has been through his excellent north porch, but before going inside, take a tour of the building (as you always do, I'm sure). Teulon's transepts are super, and I love his stairway turret to the tower. Walking around, the reset stone coffin lids in the south chancel wall are slightly surreal.

The unicorn.

If Teulon made a good job of the exterior, I'm afraid that his work inside is a bit of a disaster.

In a misguided attempt to fill the crossing with light, and increase the drama of the view to the east, he destroyed the western archway to the crossing, and replaced it with an Early English one. (It is so cheesy, one is tempted to call it Earlie Englishe.)

This is pretty awful; fortunately, the eastern arch into the chancel survives intact.

A great delight stands to the west, though; this is the font, which is most unusual. Instead of angels, it features a bestiary accompanying the Evangelistic symbols.

There is a fine unicorn, and a pelican-in-her-piety. Even more charming are the monks who sit around the shaft beneath. One is reading, another meditating, the other two holding objects. Mortlock thought they were a treasurer's satchel and a reliquary, but Jeremy Bangs tells me that it could be a book bag - you can find such books with bags attached in medieval paintings and sculptures.

The whole thing is surmounted by one of those neurotic towering font covers, familar from Hadleigh and Bury St James, the fruit of tentative 1930s triumphalism.

Below the font, and guarding the shaft, a monk reads the breviary...

...while his fellow grasps an object, and guards it for dear life. Could it be a book bag? Or a reliquary?

The other internal furnishings are of excellent quality; Anne Riches' supplement to Cautley records that they are based on the benches at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire. A modern nave altar, decorated with ears and stooks of wheat, sits beneath the crossing in the approved Vatican II manner.

Left, the modern nave altar, and above, its companion of a century earlier.

The chancel beyond contains medieval return stalls, but is otherwise a superb example of late 19th/early 20th century richness, and the east window reflects the essential and enduring agricultural character of this parish.

Above: the west doorway (the door is Victorian, but the stonework at least 800 years old).

Right: Sarah Spicer.

Don't leave without exploring the churchyard. Two notable graves are the one to three Victorian sisters south of the nave, and one of Suffolk's finest modern memorials, the sandstone pillar in the extreme north east corner. It seems to echo the house beyond, and I wondered if there was a connection.

But what about the village, I hear you ask. Well, as you've been so patient, I'll tell you. Pakenham is the only village in England still to have working both a windmill and a watermill. There. And it's got a pretty good pub, as well.

From the north east.

St Mary, Pakenham, is just to the north east of Bury St Edmunds. Exit the A14 at Thurston, and follow the signs north through the village. I found it locked, but a key is available at the neighbouring Vicarage, and also at the village shop. It's probably the biggest key I've ever used!