It isn't just a pretty name, it's a lovely place; but if you want to see it, you will have to find it first. Shelley must be among the most remote of all Suffolk villages, particularly when approached from the south. No major road goes anywhere near, and you will need to remind yourself that you are less than seventy miles from central London.

Coming down from the hills, you find a simple street hugging the River Brett, which gently bottoms out here. Houses are old and scattered, and you could easily miss the church with its low tower as you take the corner.

The tower is worth a second glance, for several reasons. Firstly, its unusual location; it stands to the north of the nave - indeed, because the south aisle extends fully westwards, it appears to be behind the church. In a rare misreading of his notes, Mortlock suggests that it is also the main entrance, but this is not the case; the north side of the churchyard is hemmed in quite severely, and you enter directly into the south aisle from a pretty little wood and brick porch.

Before this, though, it is well worth a visit round to the north side, since there you will find a gorgeous little chapel, built for the Tylney family after the Reformation. It is now a vestry.

I was amused to see that the noticeboard still Claimed as Vicar the name of a friend of mine who left to shepherd an inner-city Anglo-catholic parish in Ipswich several years back. Things move slowly in a place like Shelley.

Although not militantly Anglo-catholic itself, this is a church that still reserves the sacrament, and a sanctuary lamp burns to the south of the altar. The Sanctuary is plain and fitting, very Anglican in its simplicity. Also very Anglican is the elegant Elizabethan pulpit, a rather sturdy example of the wineglass style. The nice churchwarden informed me that it had 'recently begun to wobble', so he'd cemented it in more securely.

He also showed me the pretty organ in the south aisle, which came here from Woodbridge St John. He told me that he brought it over bit by bit in his car, and laid all the pieces out on the church floor without the least idea of how to put them together! But it is working now.

Many people who come to Shelley will do so to see Dame Margarett Tylney. Her effigy lies in a window embrasure to the west of the pulpit - rather unnervingly, a preacher must look down into her sleeping face. It is strange to think that, from this very pulpit, a 16th century Minister looked down into her face when she was awake - or at least, one assumes so.

She wears a ruff and a black dress, the very model of Elizabethan piety. She died in 1598, shortly before the Tudor dynasty ended - she was part of its last gasp, and barely forty years separate her from the madness of the Commonwealth and the vandalism of the Puritans - she looks from another age.

She is probably in the wrong place. There is an alcove in the north chancel wall that may have accomodated her, and some shields further east may have come from the same place. Although the medieval structure that survives here is considerable, like virtually all churches to the south of Hadleigh it was thoroughly scoured and reinvented by the Victorians.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and as much as Dame Margarett might have resented being shifted out of the chancel, the restoration has left Shelley with a lovely little village church that is at once beautiful and dignified, and also in reasonable condition. I'm sure that she would have approved of that.

All Saints, Shelley, is set back from the village street, about three miles to the south of Hadleigh. I found it open.

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