St Mary, Depden

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St Mary is so tree-bowered that you don't actually see the church until you stumble across it from the north, the churchyard opening out as if it were a forest clearing in a fairy tale. Apart from the tower, which will evidence dates to after 1451, this is a church that was substantially as it is now by the end of the 14th Century, and the windows of the nave and chancel may even date to the previous century.

On the night of 23rd of June 1984, this church was destroyed by fire. At that unhappy time for the Anglican diocese, when many churches were being declared redundant, it would have been very easy for the site to be abandoned, and St Mary to now be an ivy-shrouded ruin. However, the will of the community was that the church should be saved, and what a good job they made of it! The interior is full of light and simplicity, the modern chairs facing the clean, cool chancel. A surprise in this setting is the 13th Century piscina on the south side of the chancel which perhaps gives a date for the rebuilding of the church, and to the side of it is the east window with its collection of Continental glass.

It seems to be a collection purchased from a dealer, perhaps JC Hampp of Norwich, and was likely installed here in the early 19th Century by Samuel Yarrington. Some of the glass is 16th century and from Steinfeld Abbey in Germany. The two central panels are from a sequence of the Passion, and depict Christ meeting St Veronica while carrying his cross, and then in the next he is taken down from the cross and cradled in his mother's arms. But it is a little detail in the panels which make them particularly memorable, for in both of them we see a man with a ladder, walking beside Jesus on the way to Calvary, and then walking away in the distance as the disciples mourn their Messiah, his day's work done. Some are roundels of Old Testament subjects. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stand before Nebuchadnezzar, while a sore-covered Job is told by his wife to curse God and die in another.

Two pairs of late 16th Century figure brasses reset on the north wall remember Anne Drewry and her two husbands, George Waldegrave and Sir Thomas Jermyn, thus three of the most prominent Suffolk family names of that century coming together. She kneels across a prayer desk from each of them in separate scenes, but a single inscription beneath connects them. Sarah Loretta Lloyd's memorial of 1838 was erected by her husband, the rector. Her inscription numbers her virtues in the style of the previous century, but continues with the excitement of the new century's evangelical revival, telling us that she was called to join the Spirits of the Just made Perfect, and on the 3rd May 1838 she passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death fearing no evil.

The font on the south side of the nave is a curiosity. It seems likely to be 18th Century, and may be a continental piece that arrived here in the same way as the glass in the east window. It is painted with roundels and cartouches which are likely to be more recent, I think. The window above it of the Blessed Virgin and child is an early 20th Century work by Heaton, Butler & Bayne.

It is splendid that this church has not only survived, but it is still in regular use. The local parish should be proud of themselves for what they have achieved here in the middle of the woods. It used to be said that the Church of England ministers simply by existing, a presence in every community, and that its medieval churches were its greatest act of witness. This is an unfashionable view nowadays when business management and cost-cutting seem to be the order of the day, but If it is so, then it is doubly true here.