All Saints, Ellough

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Suffolk is a soft county, the landscape rolling gently under its meadows and woodlands, a church tower punctuating the treetops and hedges every few miles. And yet, even on a sunny day Ellough church on its hilltop can be a forbidding prospect.The 14th Century tower is stark and the low pitch of the continuous nave and chancel roof is severe. From the south, it glowers at the top of its wild hilly graveyard, like something out of a 19th Century novel. On a stormy day, it doesn't take much to imagine a Victorian funeral procession picking its way among the gravestones. From the north the prospect is even starker, for the churchyard is flat and wide. The historic parish included part of the town of Beccles, which explains why there are quite so many 19th Century headstones in this remote spot.

A long path from that time runs along the high wall, and is now broken up and overgrown. The whole place feels summarily abandoned, which, in fact, it was. In 1973, All Saints was one of the first churches in Suffolk to be declared redundant. It is not hard to see why. This is a wild area, of narrow roads and few people. Some churches are warm sanctuaries in the face of such bleakness, but it is hard to imagine that All Saints was ever a comforting place. The opening of St Luke a couple of miles off on the Rigbourne Hill estate meant that there was no longer a reason for the people of south Beccles to head out here, and the church is now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

All Saints underwent a severe Victorian restoration, which was surprisingly the work of William Butterfield, responsible for All Saints, Margaret Street. But none of the drama and beauty of his central London church are repeated here. The tall, plain nave leads to a tiled chancel with a simple tractarian altar. The chancel arch is Butterfield's and the angel corbels are recognisably his. His also was the organ chamber, but the organ was removed, along with the pulpit and choir stalls, in 1973. Interestingly, the base of the pulpit remains, with the names of the 19th century labourers carved into the stone - these would have been hidden of course, once the pulpit was in place. Among them are B Keable, FC Allen, C Dack, R Boon FCA, H Warne and A Coll. They inscribed their names on the 7th December 1883 - was that the day the work finished here, I wonder?

There is an unusual memorial to Richard Arnold and his wife Charlotte on the south wall of the chancel. Arnold was rector here for more than sixty years in the 19th Century, and the marble monument features brass roundel portraits of them both. The memorial was placed here by his children, to mark the restoration of the chancel, and it looks as if Charlotte was almost half a century her husband's junior. There is no death date for her, but she died young at the age of 37, which is a sad thought. Their portraits have a pre-Victorian elegance, as if they would be more at home in the Georgian town church of a Jane Austen novel than in this bleak, Gothic place.