e-mail: simon@suffolkchurches.co.uk

 

St Mary, Shotley

    The setting of this church is most curious. It is further from the village it serves than any other Suffolk church, and given that the village is one of Suffolk's biggest, it is doubly curious. Erwarton church is closer to Shotley than Shotley church is. St Mary stands in a tiny, tightly-packed hamlet in the low hills towards Chelmondiston. In fact, this was the original village. The place we now call Shotley was once an outlying fishing hamlet, Shotley Gate.

War graves by the curious St Mary.

You may only reach St Mary along one of two narrow lanes. Unusually for Suffolk, the south door opens almost onto the street. Even more unusual, the stubby tower hugs a later raised clerestory, quite out of keeping with each other. If I come here on a hot Summer's day, and climb the steep hill leading up to it, I am always reminded more of the Dordogne than of East Anglia.

  Once inside, things are mostly more familiar, and the pleasantly cool whitewashed interior seems much larger than is possible from the outside. But the most curious thing of all about this building is its chancel.

For here, in this ancient Gothic space, someone has tried to recreate the Classical chancel of a Wren city church, with dark wood coving and a clinical eye for mathematical detail within. It is all a little alarming, but unique in Suffolk, and worth visiting for that reason alone.

Outside, the vast churchyard descends steeply towards the Orwell estuary, and there are simply hundreds of military graves, mainly Royal Navy, but also some for German sailors who were killed near here. Until the 1980s, HMS Ganges at Shotley was one of the Royal Navy's training colleges. You can still see the former buildings two miles away, in the heart of the sprawling village.








St Mary, Shotley, is located at the end of an unclassified road north of the B1456 between Chelmondiston and Shotley. It is open during the day.

  

Curiouser and curiouser. The classical chancel arch, and Wren city church beyond. It doesn't fit, but never mind - nothing does here.