At the sign of the Barking lion...

St Andrew, Capel St Andrew

At the sign of the Barking lion...

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Capel St Andrew

   
   
Capel St Andrew   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.
  Capel St Andrew
   

Simon Knott, September 2008

 

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