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Rickinghall Inferior,
and its neighbour Rickinghall Superior,
are names that seem to have stepped straight out of
Somerset; or, at least, out of the pages of a Thomas
Hardy novel. The Superior church is up on the hill beyond
the bypass, mean, moody and redundant. The Inferior one
is down (hence its name) in the centre of this trim
suburban village, which stretches for a couple of miles
along the A143, becoming Botesdale without you
realising it.
Lush and
ornate, it seems almost to flutter its eyelashes.
Unusually in Suffolk, the
first impression of St Mary is that it is startlingly
attractive, like a pretty girl whose eye you catch in the
street. Partly, this is because of the gorgeously ornate
Norman tower, turned into a Decorated wedding cake in the
early 14th century.
The two
storey porch. Note the camp Victorian windows in
the south wall of the nave.
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The strong aisle and long
porch accentuate a sense of voluptuousness, with
their ornate decoration, some of it Victorian. This is not a long church, and gives an
impression of roundness. It is this that
overcomes your normal instinct to clinically
search for details, and I was not surprised to
find someone already in the churchyard taking
photos.
Like many churches in larger
villages, St Mary has been constantly reinvented
over the years, and little remains of its
medieval life and liturgy. The strong independent
spirit of the south aisle is repeated inside. It
is wide, as if this was another Pakefield, and there were two churches side by
side.
Everything is pretty, but
heavily restored. The rood loft panels were reused as a reredos, and painted in a medieval style, which
is interesting.
More interesting, perhaps, is
the question of where they went between the
destruction of the rood loft in the 1540s, and
the construction of the reredos more than 300
years later.
St Mary,
Rickinghall Inferior, is located directly on the
A143 Bury to Diss road, in the middle of the
village. It was locked without a keyholder - but
I found that the listed keyholder for Rickinghall
Superior had this one as well, so you might be
best to go there first.
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