Shipmeadow

St Bartholomew, Shipmeadow

St Bartholomew, Shipmeadow, is one of several churches sold off for private use in the 1970s, as part of the Anglican Diocese's ill-conceived plan to rationalise its resources.

This is now a private house, and has been one of the more successful conversions. It seems rather rude to peer in the windows, but if you did then you would see that the interior integrity has been largely preserved. The interior furnishings and memorials were transferred up to road to Barsham. Presumably remaining are the two pierced stone corbels either side of the chancel that Cautley recorded here in 1938. He thought them fixings for the Lenten veil.

The gate of the private house beside the former churchyard gate. This has been preserved, because it is a memorial.

The generous people who live here continue to allow access to the churchyard for the maintenance of graves, genealogical research, etc. And this is a landmark church, on the busy road from Bungay to Beccles, in a not particularly attractive village. It is good and important that the village is still, to an extent, able to focus its identity on its parish church, even if the use of it is lost forever.

Curiously, above it on the hill stands another redundant church - the former workhouse chapel of St James, beside the brooding hulk of the building that gave it its reason to be.

St Bartholomew, Shipmeadow, is located to the north of the A146 between Beccles and Bungay. It is now a private house. See MAP