St Mary, Parham, Suffolk
By a fantastic sleight of hand, the A12 dual carriageway threads as a result of the most intensely rural heart of Suffolk, and still a mile or so from its course you wouldn’t even know it was there. Tiny, stunning villages are joined by lattices of tiny lanes which meander sleepily about the fields and copses of sprawling, empty parishes. They are in no individual hurry to get wherever. In the villages you can even now locate the occasional outdated-fashioned pub, and for miles close to the churches are all open each individual working day, pretty much.
Parham has no pub, but it does have a fascinating church. The coronary heart of the village, pronounce Parrum, is not much off the busy highway which connects Framlingham to the A12, and the church is set in a minor dip with ancient properties in attendance. It dates from a main rebuilding of the late 14th Century. You enter the churchyard by a fairly thatched lychgate in the north-west corner, and the graves sprawl away south and eastwards, an interesting but specifically uneven and bumpy graveyard.
At 1st sight, the most hanging feature of the exterior of the church is the huge specialized niche on the western deal with of the tower. It almost certainly held a rood team, the crucifixion in the middle, with John the Evangelist and Mary the Mom of God on possibly facet. You can see that it would have had a most elaborate cover. The jap buttresses of the tower are parallel to the tower eastern face and there are no battlements on the tower, producing it look fairly extreme, specially with the lower nave roof. The nave windows are tall and stately, creating the church feel instead bigger than it actually is. There was a large refurbishment a hundred yrs later on, as a result the huge window beneath the market, and the grand north porch, now a vestry.
Unusually for Suffolk, you enter the church from the west, beneath the gallery. The interior is incredibly roomy, supplied that there are no aisles. The making is entire of light – there is really very little coloured glass, and the dado panels of the rood display ended up taken out in the 1880s, leaving just the tracery painted in a homosexual pink and inexperienced. It gave Cautley the horrors, and even designed Mortlock tut, but I fairly like it. The whole setting up has a feeling of place simply because of it, strange in a church so comprehensively restored in the 1880s. The reredos beyond is a basic and seemly construction, a cobbling collectively of 17th century woodwork with a image of the Final Supper in the Russian type. I would have appreciated to have recognised exactly where it came from. Higher than it is some superior 15th Century glass, albeit restored. 4 angel musicians in the higher tracery search on with the really serious faces of that century.
England’s medieval church buildings are deposit and treasure houses of the people memory of their parish. Right here at Parham the Corrance household were the folks at the Significant Household. Frederick Snowden Corrance was the Conservative MP for East Suffolk, and in 1872 his nine 12 months aged only son Charles laid the initial stone (nevertheless it was almost certainly a brick) of the village school. The building has now absent, but the perseverance plaque survives, and is in the church. It notes that the university was created by voluntary contributions of the landowners of this parish. One more plaque records that, in the adhering to 10 years, the roofs and pews have been replaced by a bequest from George Corrance, who was presumably Charles Corrance’s grandfather. His uncle, a further Charles, was vicar at the time.
There is a superior established of Restoration royal arms, suggesting the locals ended up glad to see the back again of the Commonwealth. But, curiously, if the 17th century communion rails seem odd, it is due to the fact alternate balusters have been taken off by a person who, presumably, assumed it was a good thought at the time. Remembering Archbishop Laud’s most important cause for setting up these types of issues in the to start with spot, most likely they just required to permit the pet dogs again in.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2016-09-05 18:35:57
Tagged: , Parham , Suffolk , East Anglia , church
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