I came down from
Butley, into this haunting landscape of
fields and marshes which disappear into
each other. Eventually, I reached the
long farm building at the crossroads. I
was interested to see, set in the corner,
a Victorian post box, still in use.
Intrigued, I noticed that it still has
two collections every day. And yet, there
cannot be more than half a dozen houses
within a mile of here. THe post boxes on
the Chantry Estate in Ipswich, where I
work, and which has a population of more
than 30,000, get emptied just once a day.
Despite the name of this
village, there is no church here, and
hasn't been for centuries. It retains its
name to distinguish it from Capel St Mary
on the other side of Ipswich. It was a
vicarage of Butley Priory, which may have
contributed to its demise at the hands of
the reformers, since there has never been
much of a population here. Today, as I
say, there are barely any houses at all,
and only a couple of farms.
Until fifteen years
ago, the silence of the landscape round
about was punctuated by the scream of
jets, because we are only a few miles
from the main runway of the former US
base at Bentwaters, but all is quiet now.
We know that the
church existed in 1529, but had been
demolished by 1553. We know the
approximate location of its site from the
bones and masonry unearthed by farm
machinery near Church Farm. If you'd like
to go and stand where this faith
community once met, then you can do so at
OS reference TM375479.
For the Millennium, a superb steel
sculpture has been erected in the parish
on the road to Butley. It shows St Andrew
the fisherman, with a catch of herrings
and eels. At his feet is the church,
which is now the only church in the
parish of Capel St Andrew. It bears the
date 1539, when Butley Priory was
dissolved. Although, of course, we can't
know if the church really looked like
this.
Simon Knott, September 2008
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