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This was my third visit to
Worlington, out on the edge of Suffolk
where it starts to get nice as you leave
Mildenhall's gloomy orbit. The first
occasion I'd been here was in 2003,
comletely oblivious to the fact that my
camera's aperture had developed a fault,
and all the photographs I took in here
(and also those I'd already taken at
those two giants, Lakenheath and
Mildenhall) would not come out. This
village seems to have been reasonably
prosperous at all periods; the photograph
above shows the late 13th Century
Decorated chancel, and the late 15th
century clerestory
and aisle.
There are earlier lancets on the north
side. But the big deal, as you may have
noticed, is that All Saints retains a sanctus bell turret,
used to suspend the bell that rings out
at the consecration of the Mass. The bell
still exists, but is in Moyse Hall Museum
in Bury.
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I
came back on Historic Churches bike ride day in
2003. And here's the curious thing. I pottered
about inside and out, taking photographs, and
then moved on to Beck Row. But there, the
replacement camera I'd bought in 2000 also gave
up the ghost. This means that Worlington church
was the last place I ever used a film camera. It
would all be digital from now on.
Worlington
is in one of the few corners of East Anglia where
they lock their churches, but the very friendly
keyholder lives in the house next door, and when
we came back in the summer of 2011 she heard our
voices in the churchyard, and she came out with
the key to us. I remembered liking this church a
lot, and I wasn't disappointed. Like its
neighbour Freckenham it is a fairly quirky
interior, and all the more memorable for this.
| The Norman font is pressed
against a pillar of the south arcade, a
position which appears to have been
conventional before the middle medieval
period, and on the pillars of the arcade
are fascinating graffiti from down the
centuries. Below the capitals, the
pillars are decorated with pointed head
arches, and you can see eaxctly the same
thing a couple of miles off at
Lakenheath. There
are some good monuments, the best of
which is the 1822 memorial to Rice James,
and some medieval glass in the upper
lights. There is a splash of
Elizabethan wall painting beside the
chancel arch, presumably intended to
decorate an improving text designed to
turn the people's heads away from
Catholicism. Most memorable of
all, I think, is the ticking of the parliamentary clock
which made sure that 19th Century
Worlington kept pace with London.
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