Ringshall

St Catherine, Ringshall

A touch austere - the Norman tower of St Catherine.

Late autumn was a good time to visit St Catherine. It sits beside a wood, on a hill above the narrow road, which makes it sound idyllic; but this is agricultural country.

There is a hardstanding area for vehicles below the rise of the ploughed field, and the containers parked on it on this muddy October day made it convincingly bleak.

This is not a bad thing; I thought it very atmospheric, and as I pushed my bike up the steep swampy track I imagined Victorian funeral processions making the same journey.

The tower here is certainly quite something. It is that unusual thing for Suffolk - a square Norman tower, with very little alteration since.

Generally, the exterior of the church has been patched up rather than rebuilt, although the porch is Richard Phipson's, from the Boys' Bumper Book of Genuine Medieval Features (1870s edition). Phipson is a conscientious architect, but no one could call him imaginiative. However, his work has a degree of comforting self-confidence,.

There is something bleak to contrast with it; the high perimeter fence at the top of the opposite rise. We'll come back to it in a moment.

The door was not locked, and I stepped into an interior that I immediately liked. In my opinion, St Catherine is pretty much what a remote village church should be.

It is clearly ancient, but entirely refurbished by Richard Phipson in 1878. There are no major monuments or significant medieval liturgical survivals, but it is open; not for tourists, then, but as a church open for prayer, or even just for the special silence of an ancient place. It is dim inside without being gloomy, and a bit damp, making an organic transition between graveyard and church on this late Autumn day. I could sit here awhile, and know I was in the presence of God. I liked it a lot.

Phipson's textbook porch fronts a patched up building that was obviously once thatched (see the drip course on the tower). Also, spot the wooden peg tying the roof beam between the lancet and the drainpipe.

There is one of those 13th century Purbeck marble fonts more familar from the East of Suffolk, supported here on pretty Victorian pillars; but everything else, pretty much, is Phipson's. The roof beams look original to my uneducated eye, but Mortlock thinks that the hammerbeams that support them were all replaced in the 1870s. They look low enough for you to hit your head on. Unusually, there is what appears to be a piscina set in the east wall of the sanctuary, behind the altar. Phipson was far to liturgically literate to reset one there, and it doesn't appear to be an aumbry in disguise. Why it is here and not in the south wall as usual is a mystery.

Looking east. The tie beams with their kingposts look low enough to knock your head on.

Right: another Purbeck marble font bowl, but this one has been reset on modern pillars - rather effective, actually.

I loved the 19th century picture hanging up at the back of the church. It is called The Wide and Narrow Paths, and depicts all the stumbling blocks on our journey through life. Verses from the bible are used to illustrate where we can fall. As far as I could make out, it looks like we are all going to hell.

I stepped outside into the graveyard, where the day was still deciding whether or not to bother me with rain. Looking back at the south side of the church, I was fascinated to see that the roof beams protruded, and were tied and braced to the outside of the wall by huge wooden pegs.

The graveyard is wide and open, the long grass climbing the slope. I walked up to the top of it, and found that the extension eastwards consisted almost entirely of military graves.

Looking westwards, there was that perimeter fence again. St Catherine is one of three medieval churches on the edge of the Wattisham airfield, one of the country's major military helicopter bases. At the time of my visit, many of the people here were involved in the assault on Afghanistan; the thought of this was quite a contrast with my feelings about the inside.

The other two medieval churches are Great Bricett, near the main gate, and Wattisham itself, now redundant. Of the three, St Catherine is most obviously the one that serves the local military community, although there is also a base church.

From the north east. The buttresses are probably 18th century, like Farnham and Wenhaston.

The ancient ways that once linked those three communities have now disappeared beneath the towers, hangers and runways of the western military-industrial complex, and I would see quite a lot of that perimeter fence over the next few hours as I skirted almost completely around it.

As I wandered back down the slope of the graveyard, a huge pheasant broke cover from behind a headstone. It fled into the woods, whirring like a helicopter. As I watched it go, I saw what I should have noticed before; there were about a dozen of them, perched silently in attitudes of stupidity and defiance, on stumps and branches, watching me warily. Their sullen splashes of red were an empty threat in the darkening day.

St Catherine, Ringshall, is to the south of Stowmarket. It is signposted off of the B1078 Stowmarket to Bildeston road near Barking. I found it open.