Barton Mills, Suffolk

I presupposed that St Mary would be firmly locked so it was a pleasure to find that it was open and obviously well loved and maintained. Truth be told though it's rather asceptic and contains little of real interest.

ST MARY. Mostly Dec, the W tower perhaps a little earlier. Five-light E window with a reticulated arrangement in which the top motif is a pointed oval rather than having ogee top and bottom. The ‘low-side’ window on the S side of the chancel has tracery with a four-petalled flower in the top. Arcade of four bays, with octagonal piers, double-chamfered arches, and hood-moulds on heads. The clerestory windows are above the spandrels, not the apexes of the arcade. - FONT. Octagonal with flat Dec arch and tracery motifs, almost a mason’s pattern-book of such motifs. - PULPIT. Jacobean. - STAINED GLASS. Original C14 fragments in the S aisle, also nearly complete (though headless) figures. - E window by Clayton & Bell, c. 1866. - Chancel N window by Heaton, Butler & Bayne, c. 1907, in the (by then antiquated) Walter Crane style. - SE window by Ward & Hughes, c. 1867. - PLATE. Paten 1710; Flagon 1746. - MONUMENT. Civilian and wife, c. 1480. Incised slab, the effiges mostly effaced.

BARTON MILLS. Its church tower goes back about a thousand years, for in it is the long-and-short work dear to Saxon builders. Here also in the windows are eight green dragons that have kept unwearied watch for 20 generations. In the days when the dragons came here the village was reading the time by the old scratch dial, and probably opening the church door with the same curious iron handle that is here today. The handsome arcades, with 28 stone faces above the piers, are 14th century; so is the traceried piscina and the finely carved font. There is a Jacobean pulpit and a handsome old oak chest with iron bands, and in the wind and the rain are two stone figures turned out of the church in the Long Ago.

Flickr.