Church Micro 1258 - Leavenheath Traditional Geocache
The Growler: can't maintain I'm afraid
Church Micro 1258 - Leavenheath
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A warm, friendly small Victorian church lying in a small tree-lined
hollow just off the A134.
At the cost of £400 9s 5d, (about £80,000 in today's money, a
bargain then or now) the new church was constructed in red brick,
and consecrated on the morning of the 13th September, 1836. It was
a little towerless chapel, much in the contemporary style, with few
of the trimmings that the growing sacramentalism of the next few
decades would demand. Broadly speaking, it is the part of the
present church to the left of the tower, although I think that the
lovely white frontage, porch and buttressing must be later, for
reasons that I will explain in a moment.
The architect was G R French, and an intriguing passage in White's
1844 Directory of Suffolk notes that it was built near the site of
an old Quaker burial ground. Since such things were usually beside
meeting houses, perhaps there was already a Friends' presence on
the heath before the Anglicans came along.
The new church had the status of a chapel of ease to the mother
church at Stoke by Nayland, but was provided with its own minister,
the fiery evangelical Harold Curry, who, White tells us, had his
own adjoining house - this must be the one to the rear of the site,
now a private house. The minister was also provided with two acres
of land, and a 3% return on £1,100 in stock. By the time of the
1851 census of religious worship, the little chapel was maintaining
morning and evening services, with an average attendance of 120 for
the first and more than 200 for the second. It must have been a
tight fit. So much so that, in 1880, Mortlock tells us that the
architects Satchell and Edwards were called in to extend the
building. They built the splendid bell tower with a wide south
aisle behind it, and extended the original church eastwards with
the addition of a chancel. These are strongly in the Tudor style,
even with the addition of wide Perpendicular windows, and so I
think they must also have been responsible for the frontage now in
place on the original church, with its porch, all of which is fully
Tudor in style. For example, the lancet window above the entrance
matches a double one in the south wall of the new chancel. The use
of unnecessary buttressing would have been fully in keeping with
the style of the 1880s. So, we may assume that the architects
completely transformed this place. When the dead of the First World
War were buried in military cemeteries in northern France, the
temporary wooden crosses that marked their graves were sent home to
their parishes. Often, these were displayed in the village church,
perhaps with a photograph of the dead. They are terrible things to
see - almost all of them were young men in their late teens and
early twenties, and all of them must have been well-known to
everyone else in the village. Over the years, many of the crosses
have disappeared, perhaps taken back by families, or discarded as
an irrelevance. But St Matthew still contains six of them; only Old
Melton, with seven, has more. And Leavenheath retains the
photographs of the young men too.
If any body would like to add to this series, please do, but could
you please let sadexploration know first, so he can keep track of
the Church numbers and names to avoid duplication.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
fvk srrg hc