| |
|
Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England
Twitter.
The way to approach Thorington is by bike
along the narrow lanes from Wenhaston, jinking and
rolling through the fields and then over the heath,
before descending down into the deeply cut lane. The
church with only its former rectory beside it among a
boiling of great trees, and on this day in early April
2019 the setting was so lovely that I could forget for a
moment that the awful A12 thundered northwards not half a
mile from here. With the early spring light cascading
through the trees which were just coming into leaf
like something almost being said it could have been
any time.
The round tower is one of Suffolk's oldest, and perhaps
its loveliest. The pretty battlements were added in the
16th century. The blind arcades that line it are typical
of late Saxon/early Norman design, and although there is
some evidence of Victorian repair, they don't seem to
have been rebuilt. The mock-Norman west window belongs to
the 19th Century, however, and this is a hint of what
we're going to find inside. Apart from the window and the
battlements. Thorington's tower must have stood here like
this through the alternating seasons for at least a
thousand years.
This is one of those churches which is always open, and
you step into an interior which is inevitably a
disappointment. As at Wissington, Wordwell, Whepstead
and, most stupefyingly, Stoven, the Victorians did not
think this interior Norman enough, and so they made it
more Norman than it was already. At this distance, I'm
afraid that much Victorian mock-Norman appears as clumsy
kitsch, and of course it does not age well. In their
defence, this church was certainly near-derelict by the
late 19th Century, and the overpowering restoration would
have saved it from loss. Thus, both the chancel arch and
the tower arch are both 19th Century reinventions, the
sanctuary a drama of Tractarian coloured glass and
painted wood, the prim pitch-pine benches squeezed into
the narrow nave. And yet, and yet... there is something
haunting about the faded gentrification of this little
church, the birdsong in the air, the damp air rising, as
though it cannot stop being organic, at one with its
setting.
Ernest Geldart's reredos has gathered dust, fading gently
over the years. It sits below a good 1858 Heaton &
Butler window, interesting to see as it is just before
Robert Bayne came along and gave the workshop its glory
years. And yet even this attempted grandeur is softened
by the lovely window by Thomas Baillie which spills its
coloured light across the sanctuary from the north side
of the chancel, a naive depiction of Christ handing the
keys of the kingdom to St Peter while two little Suffolk
sheep look on. There is something not quite right about
the depiction, and then it hits you - Christ's hands
already bear the scars of his crucifixion.
The grand 18th Century memorials to the Bence family seem
curiously out of scale in this little church. The chancel
was rebuilt as part of the 1860s restoration, and so they
must have been reset in more or less their original
places. The Bences were the local big family, and
presumably also presented their sons to the living.
There are some intriguing survivals. One is the gorgeous
14th century piscina that now sits against the raised
floor of the Victorian chancel. And turning west you can
see that above the Victorian tower arch is another
opening, rediscovered in recent years. It seems too large
to have been a window, perhaps for the ringing of the
sanctus bell, and so the only other conclusion that can
be drawn is that it was actually a doorway. But why not
at ground level? It is easy to imagine a ladder leading
up to this entrance could be taken away, or even drawn
up, so was there some defensive purpose intended? Beneath
the tower, the font is a cobbled-together piece, an
arcaded font of the 13th Century reset on a typically
East Anglian 15th Century stem, the lions surviving, the
woodwoses not.
The First World War memorial is a curiosity, the flanking
pillars like Moorish minarets, or were they intended as
shells? The Bence-Trowers, as they had become, gave both
their sons to the War. The two boys died a day apart. The
surviving battlefield cross to Alfred Bence Trower,
tucked across the nave near the door, is perhaps the most
haunting thing of all in this place.
Simon Knott, April 2019
Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England
Twitter.
|
|
|
