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Aldringham
is the posh end of Leiston these days, I
suppose. It merges into the
agro-industrial greyness towards Coldfair
Green; as you head into it from central
Leiston, you pass the Ogilvie almshouses,
a name we will meet again later. If the village is
rather mundane, then the same cannot be
said of St Andrew. You head out across
the heath towards the fantasy holiday
village of Thorpeness, which we will
also come back to, and then turn
southwards on a track through the forest,
out into the pines and broom.
Incongruously, a row of 19th century
almshouses looms into view, looking for
all the world as if it had been picked up
from the terraces of east Ipswich and
dumped here. And there, at the western
end, is the delightful church of St
Andrew, looking very pretty among the
pine trees. I had first seen it on a
dull, dark, dismal day in November 2000,
and so it was a pleasure to come back on
the hottest day so far of 2010 in bright
sunshine. At first sight, the church is
entirely Victorian, and might even be
contemporary with the terrace. However, a
blocked door and lancet in the south
chancel wall give us a probable original
date of about 1200, and a rood
loft stair buttress also tells us of
this former, Catholic liturgical age. A
very good modern extension leads off from
the north doorway.
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If you had come
here 150 years ago, You would have found a tall,
ruined 15th century tower, like the one at Corton, 20 miles to the north.
The church was painted in 1842, and you can see
the tower in the third small photograph at the
top of this page. But that is all gone now, for
St Andrew was consolidated and completely
refurbished inside and out in the mid 19th
century. I think the Victorians made a pretty
good job of it. The chancel priest door is
blocked, and beside it on a buttress is the
parish WWII memorial.
The south porch
leads down into the body of the nave, and you
step down into a church which is full of
colour.From a historical point of view the most
important survival is probably the 15th century font. This is one of the
typically East Anglian fonts, of which about 160
survive in Suffolk, showing angels and evangelistic
symbols on
the bowl, and lions on the stem. Of all of them,
this is one of the best. The seating is banked at
the west end, and above it is one of two
excellent, large 19th century windows. For such a
small church to have two such large windows is
rather unusual. This one is by Alexander Gibbs,
and shows the disabled man being lowered by his
friends through the roof to Christ. The
inscription reads This window was placed here
in grateful memory of Letitia Caroline Susannah
Cannon who died November 8th 1896 aged 81 years,
helpless from paralysis during 11 1/2 years. She
abounded in most generous gifts to the poor, the
church, the churchyard and the endowment. At
the other end of the church the window depicts
the feeding of the five thousand. These two
unusual subjects suggest a particularly
evangelical hue to the 19th century congregation
here, and create a church like no other in the
area. There is a fine, more modern window of St
Andrew in a lancet in the south side, which the
19th century restorers here would no doubt have
considered idolatrous..
There is an
outstanding Art Nouveau memorial in the
north-west corner of the churchyard to Letitia
Cannon and her husband. I assume that the
elaborate ironwork decorative fencing came from
the foundry at nearby Leiston. But probably the
most memorable thing about this churchyard is the
collection of Ogilvie memorials on the southern
side of the churchyard. A narrow avenue of box
hedging led from the south porch. When I came
this way in 2000, this was punctuated by
scatterings of parasol mushrooms, which made a
very pleasant meal later that night. Today, in
the heat of summer, I had been warned to watch
out for snakes in the churchyard - adders are
common on this wooded heathland. I continued
towards what looked like the village war
memorial. Indeed, it is used as the village war
memorial, but that is not all it is. It is a
memorial to one of the Ogilivies, killed late on
in the first war; but, as it is so much grander
than the simple, pretty one set in the rood stair
buttress of the church, it was here in that
November that I had found the wreaths of plastic
poppies were leaning. The inscription mentions
Alexander Walter Ogilvie, who died on October
30th 1918, by name, but also makes reference to
Lasting Remembrance of the Great Host of Heroes
who made the Supreme Sacrifice 1914-1918. The
names of the Aldringham dead are hidden away
behind it, as if an afterthought. As I reached
it, I was staggered by the massed ranks of large
tomb chests on either side of it; Ogilvies to the
left of me, Ogilvies to the right. It is the
grandest collection of 20th century family tombs
in all Suffolk, not excluding the Quilters at Bawdsey. The Ogilvies were
fabulously well-to-do, and their name is all over
this part of Suffolk, including those almshouses
towards Leiston.
The Ogilvies lived
at Sizewell Hall, and quite literally shaped the
map of Suffolk; theirs was the responsibility for
building Thorpeness, the jolly holiday resort
on the coast a mile to the east of here, and for
the land on which the Sizewell nuclear reactor
was built, also a mile away. But best of all,
they are thanked every wet Saturday by the
divorced and separated fathers of Ipswich, who
can let their temporary charges loose in the
Ogilvie Room at Ipswich Museum, the biggest
public collection of Victorian stuffed birds in
the Kingdom. There are simply thousands of the
things, including a mighty representation of Bass
Rock, and all manner of exotic creatures who met
their maker during a flight over the Ogilvies'
substantial domain. On more than one display case
it says this is the only example of this bird
ever collected in Suffolk, and so we may
assume that Lord Ogilvie killed an awful lot of
birds to make sure that he got these few, a
thought which has struck me repeatedly on my many
visits to the museum. Ironically, the RSPB's huge
Minsmere bird reserve now stretches north of the
Ogilvies' former property.
I
wandered around the Ogilvies for a while,
and then headed back into the church. It
was only now that I noticed a simple
brass memorial on the south wall of the
chancel. It remembers forty-four year old
Benjamin Croft, whose name also appears
on the World War I roll opposite. What
makes him significant (he isn't an
Ogilvie, after all) is that he was killed
on 10th November 1918, the last full day
of the Great War. What an awful piece of
luck for him and his family. In 2000, the
memorial had combined with the weather
outside to infuse me with a mood of
gloom, and I remembered still my feeling
of sadness. But in 2010 I stepped out
into the sunshine, and got chatting to
people having a picnic outside the south
porch. They were parishioners taking a
break from the late spring tidy-up of the
graveyard, and they very hospitably asked
me to sit down and join them in a glass
of wine. It turned out that the Rector,
who I had met in the church, had told
them who I was, and it was good to meet
some followers of the site. They seemd a
very jolly, friendly lot, and I decided
that Aldringham church must be a fine
place to be a member of the congregation. In 2010, it was the
height of the day. I saddled up my bike
and set off in the blistering heat
towards Knodishall. Back in 2000, the day
was ending. I had hoped to head on to
find the site of the lost church at Thorpe, and survey the
outside, at least, of the 1930s church of St Mary at Thorpeness. But
it was not to be, and these would have to
wait for another day. The rain was
falling steadily, all over Suffolk. I
hauled my muddy bike up the muddy path to
the almshouses, and set off across the
heath, the darkness closing in. On across
Coldfair Green, dissolving into the
landscape, following Sizewell's mighty
pylons to Saxmundham station, and then
home.
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