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This is
the smallest of all the Saints, to the
extent that it barely exists at all. A
farmhouse, a massive former Rectory
(which I plan to live in, when I win the
National Lottery), a disused garage and a
couple of cottages are barely company for
the curious church, for it sits out in
the fields, and the road up to it falls
short by 100 metres or so. A designated
footpath leads along the edge of a
ploughed field, and will take you to the
east side of the churchyard, but it isn't
easy going, even outside of winter. But the reward is
the most wonderful setting, especially
when the graveyard is high with the wild
grasses of early summer. As I stood to
the south of the church looking back at
it, the wide open fields behind me, the
sun came out, and suddenly it was
beautiful, a perfect moment.
There is a
crispness to the exterior, and it was all
heftily restored in the 1870s, a late
date for what was done inside, but the
exterior is a curious mixture of
Decorated and Norman, which must either
have echoed what was here before, or just
looked nice on the drawing board in
London. You might wonder why there are
two large Decorated windows in the north
wall, with lancets either side of them.
If you step inside, you'll find out.
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This church is
always open, twenty four hours a day. The curious
thing about the Restoration of the 1870s is that
it has left us a prayerbook church, one of very
few in the country from that century, which
devoted most of its energies into destroying
them. A pulpit sits between the two large windows
on the north wall, and all the benches are angled
towards it. Such a Protestant restoration must be
almost unique in the 1870s, when even J.C. Ryle
at Helmingham and Stradbroke was using the eastwards position.
Despite what
amounted to a near-rebuilding, All Saints is the
only church in the Saints with considerable
medieval survivals. On the north side there are
two dear little roundels of Continental glass;
one is of St Ursula holding a ship and an arrow,
and the other of St Dorothy with her flowers,
basket and the Christchild. In the south aisle
are two composites, one largely consisting of
part of a King David figure, the other a
curly-haired angel.
The
great square Norman font with its panelled sides
sits on a pedestal at the back of the church, and
beside it is a medieval bench with two curious
bench ends. One is a floppy-eared dog, while the
other is a creature with a long, curved neck. It
is probably intended as a camel, but it may
actually be a giraffe. These were known to
late-medieval Suffolkers (there is one in a bench
end at Dennington) but they
appear not to have known that their long necks
would be erect.
| There is
something particularly enticing about a
church which has a sense of its 19th
century days. At the time of the 1851
Census of Religious Worship, there were
232 people living in this parish, an
extraordinary number compared with today.
Most of them must have lived and worked
on local farms, and on the morning of the
census 87 of them made there way here for
George Sanby, the Rector of Flixton, to
lead them in divine worship. This figure
of one in four is very high for Suffolk,
and another 33 were in the local
Methodist church, suggesting that they
were a particularly religious lot in this
neck of the woods - or, perhaps, that the
local landowners were insistent that
their employees went to church. Today, without a
parish to speak of, it is inevitable that
this church has been declared redundant.
The Churches Conservation Trust do their
usual fine job in looking after it. That
it is the only one of the Saints to have
suffered this fate is more remarkable.
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