After being requisitioned during the war, it became a boarding school for the GLC. The writer Ian McEwan is a famous ex-pupil. The school closed in the 1980s; its massive library was broken up, and you regularly come across items from it in Suffolk's second-hand bookshops. In a grand sale shortly after the closure, I bought the school's copies of McEwan's books for 50p each. The Hall lay empty for several years, until Ipswich Girls' High School moved out here from central Ipswich, and restored it to something like its former glory.

Nice yews, shame about the door lock.

I last visited Woolverstone on a sunny Saturday afternoon, to find the school sports day in progress. It was like cycling into an Angela Brazil story. The road to the church becomes the main drive to the hall beyond St Michael, but the church is shoe-horned into a tight churchyard, lawns trimmed behind an iron fence, and billowing with yews. Apart from its setting, it looks rather an undistinguished building; like its neighbours Wherstead and Freston, it is thoroughly Victorianised, and also thoroughly locked.

In fact, this church has benefited from an extraordinarily important pair of architects, a sign of the money and good taste of the Berners. in the 1860s, Sir George Gilbert Scott, presumably taking a country break from St John's College Chapel, Cambridge, rebuilt the chancel. It is as unremarkable as his work at St Peter in Ipswich; but, as they say, quality counts. In 1889, the maverick J.P. St Aubyn rebuilt the nave. But he must have been going through one of his sensible periods. The snazzy parapet and pinnacles are more typical of him, and it surmounts what is still basically a 15th century tower. As so often, the 15th century porch has survived all this upheaval, and there is, apparently, an aumbry to be seen inside, as well as some decent 19th and 20th century glass.

I'm sorry that this church is kept locked, because I should like to have seen inside, and God knows that there is unlikely to be anything anyone would want to steal in somewhere so Victorian. The school has a proprietary air, even moreso than the one at Nacton. It makes an excellent guardian, if not a very welcoming host. I'd be willing to bet that, if this church was open during the day, anyone keen to load up a Transit van with pitch-pine pews would take one look at the setting, and go somewhere else instead.

St Michael, Woolverstone, is off the A1456 Ipswich to Shotley road. Firmly locked, I'd hazard a guess that the vicar of Holbrook will eventually grow impatient with being rung up for the key, and will ensure a local keyholder.