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It is no
exaggeration to describe Our
Lady Immaculate and St Edmund as the most remote Catholic
church in all East Anglia. Here we are in the quiet,
lonely landscape to the east of Stoke-by Nayland, where
the narrow, high-hedged, jinking lanes descend steeply
towards the beds of nameless streams before ascending
rapidly to give commanding views across Dedham Vale. It
is breathtaking cycling country in every sense, and on
the day I came back here in October 2020 I did not pass a
car or even see another person for almost half an hour.
A quiet back lane from
Shelley circumnavigates the secretive park of Giffords
Hall and eventually approaches this simple brick chapel
with a castellated porch. Apart from the older attached
house there is no other building within half a mile. A
memorial plaque reveals its purpose: Here at
Withermarsh, the Mass has been celebrated without
interruption from about 1216, first nearby in a medieval
chapel visible from this place in the grounds of Giffords
Hall; then in the hall itself under the care of the
Mannock family who dwelt there for 460 years and finally
in this chapel built in 1827 under their patronage and by
public subscription to provide a permanent place of
Catholic worship.
We are in what was the Catholic parish of
Stoke-by-Nayland before the Reformation, and as it is
still now under the stewardship of the Church of England.
However, the Mannocks of adjacent Giffords Hall ignored
the Reformation, and continued their communion with the
Catholic Church. For this they suffered, although not as
much as some in England, or even in Suffolk. For
harbouring a Priest, for instance, they could have been
put to death. The Timperleys of Hintlesham Hall lost all
their wealth, their land and their beautiful house for
refusing to conform to the new established Church. A
descendant of the Timperleys remarked to me once that his
ancestor had backed the wrong horse, but for the
Mannocks, the Timperleys, the Gages of Hengrave and the
Drurys of Stanningfield, it wasn't so much a case of
thinking that the Catholic church would finally overcome
its local difficulties, as of actually believing the
Church to be true.
The date 1827 on the memorial plaque marks the Catholic
Relief Act of that year, which gave Catholics broadly
equal rights of free assembly with other non-conformist
communities. It was a time of reasonable optimism in
Suffolk, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that
Suffolk had fewer Catholics than any other county in
England, at less than 1% of the population. The late
1820s saw the building of four Catholic churches in the
county, each with their own resident Priest - the others
were at Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds and Bungay. A cottage at
Lawshall near Sudbury was also converted for use as a
church, and much of north-west Suffolk was served by the
Catholic priest at Thetford just over the Norfolk border.
The 1827 church here replaced an earlier one, erected
illegally in the middle of the 18th century. Perhaps in
such an out-of-the-way place it did not inflame
Protestant feelings, or perhaps the Mannocks were
influential enough to get away with it - it was not until
1791 that Catholics could erect buildings for the purpose
of celebrating mass, and only then under severe
restrictions.
James Bettley in the revised Buildings of England:
Suffolk West identifies the builder as Robert
Kingsbury of the nearby village of Boxford. The adjacent
house seems to have been upgraded as a presbytery at the
same time. You step into a calm, traditional interior
under a western gallery. The atmosphere is intensely
rustic, with simple, seemly benches facing towards a
traditional high altar. A painting of the crucifixion
hangs behind the tall candlesticks on the reredos. Two
other paintings hang either side of the church, and
perhaps all three originally came from the Hall.
 
In one corner stands a
side altar, and outside the window beside it is a prayer
desk, to allow people to go about their devotions when
the church is locked. The font is a little later than the
1820s and must have replaced an earlier font, perhaps
even the one from the 18th Century church. 1851 saw the
restoration of the heirarchy to the Catholic Church in
England and Wales, and for the first time since the
Reformation a system of parishes was revived. Even so,
the tiny Catholic population of Suffolk meant that these
parishes were often very large and were based on an
availability of buildings and clergy as much as on the
needs of their people. The Bishop was miles away in
Northampton, and most likely these remote places were
left to their own devices. But this would change, and in
the modern era this place became a chapel of ease to the
Catholic parish church of St Joseph, Hadleigh, and was
served from the modern church there, as was another
chapel at Nayland. I am sure that some people in the
parish still headed out to beautiful Withermarsh Green by
choice as much as out of necessity.
In East Anglia, Catholic Mass attendance is generally
booming, and nowhere in the diocese is there a church
which is foundering for lack of communicants. However, in
common with the rest of western Europe, the number of
priests available to preside at Mass is in decline. The
reasons for this are various, a lack of confidence in
encouraging vocations, difficulties with priestly
celibacy, the way in which the flourishing Church outside
of Europe absorbs the former surplus of priests there,
and so on. The Dioceses of England and Wales have dealt
with this problem in different ways, not all of them
popular with the ordinary lay Catholics.
In the first years of the 21st Century, the then-Bishop
of East Anglia decided that, wherever possible, mass
stations within parishes should close, and the people
should be encouraged to attend the parish church itself.
The idea was that the parish would have more sense of
itself as a community, rather than being fragmented. In
addition, the parish priest could then concentrate on
serving his people in one place, without the need to
spend most of Sunday driving around the countryside. And
so it was decided to close Withermarsh Green church. But
of course there was nothing organic about the Catholic
parishes of East Anglia. They had been created as
expedient measures in the mid-19th Century in response to
the availability of buildings, priests and the numbers of
local Catholics at the time. There was no reason why
Withermarsh Green should not equally think of itself as a
community as, say, Hadleigh.
Be that as it may, the church was closed, and it was put
up for sale. At one time it looked as if it was in real
danger of being converted into a private residence as
happened at Nayland, but fortunately it was bought by the
Fenwick family of Higham. It remains a consecrated
Catholic church. Even more pleasingly, the Fenwicks allow
the church to be used by the Latin Mass chaplaincy set up
by the current Bishop of East Anglia, and the Mass is
celebrated here in Latin every day, which must be a
moving experience out here in the remote, ancient
landscape above the Dedham Vale.
Simon Knott, October 2020
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