East Anglia is not
short of ruined and lost churches, but mostly they are in
wild and unloved places. This ruin is unusual in that the
graveyard is still in use, and we are on the edge of a
large village which is almost a small town. The ruin has
been unroofed, and the doors are gone, but otherwise it
is intact. Although one wouldn't go as far as to suggest
that picnickers frequent the former nave, it certainly is
a nice place for a stroll, and no ruined church in the
county can be easier of access.
Cars storm past on the busy Bury to Diss road, and unless
you approached the ruin up the long avenue of modern
gravestones, you might not even realise that it is no
longer a working church.
Stanton has two churches. All Saints, the other, is
smaller and perhaps less interesting. But it is half a
mile away in the centre of the village, and since the
Reformation these churches have not had separate
worshipping communities. They have shared a priest since
the 1550s, and the parishes were united in 1756. St John,
although renovated in the middle years of the 19th
century, does not seem to have been used regularly after
that. It acted as the parish church when All Saints
underwent its considerable restoration, and again when
the tower there fell in 1906.
It was derelicted in the early sixties, and is now in the
hands of the Churches Conservation Trust. The churchyard
sits almost completely to the south, and St John presses
into the churchyard's north-western corner. There is no
sanctified ground beyond. Because of this, it was
necessary to have a processional archway beneath the
tower, for the annual Corpus Christi procession, and
other ceremonials. You can see the same thing at Combs
and at St Lawrence in Ipswich.
This is a good tower, and quite a landmark on the
Bardwell road. It had four bells, one of which is now in
the campanile tower at St Francis, Ipswich. Another is at
St James Cathedral in Bury. The remarkable thing about
this church, I suppose, is that it presents a rare
opportunity to see beneath the skin of a medieval
building. You can wander at will from one space to
another, from the openness of the nave into the chancel,
which was extended in the 1850s, free of the distractions
of fixtures and furnishings.
This was a substantial church which, in its present form,
had a liturgical life of more than 500 years. Now, the
birds sing, and the occasional visitor wanders. And, if
there is little mystery left here, there is certainly a
sense of continuity. The dead of Stanton who will spend
eternity here are a touchstone to the past, just as much
as the church.
