Offton, Suffolk

St Mary, locked, keyholder listed, is an attractive roadside building which, to me, had a sympathetic more or less rebuild by Frederick Barnes. Inside the main attractions are the font and the ducklike lectern. Outside near the south porch is Sarah Wyard's 1845 table tomb is surmounted by a shrouded figure [death?] beside a horse both gazing at a corpse lying at their feet. Its listing record [here] reads:

The striking monument was commissioned by John Wyard following his wife’s death in a riding accident. He must have planned it as a family tomb, since his plaque is similar, but less elegantly lettered than that for his wife. A horse, standing besides a small bush, looks down at a now illegible figure on the ground, covered by a blanket, and accompanied by a weeping woman. The figure on the ground must be Sarah Wyatt, mourned by her daughter Amy, who was twenty-one at the time of her mother’s death. The combination of standing horse, its head bent in mourning and grieving woman, although here she stands, was inspired by one of the period's most popular sculptures, John Graham Lough's The Mourners, exhibited at the 1844 Westminster Hall exhibition, and reproduced in a cast at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

ST MARY. Simple Norman S doorway. Unbuttressed Dec W tower. Flushwork arcading on the battlements. Nave and chancel with Dec and Perp windows. In one Perp S window the soffit is nicely panelled inside. The S porch is of timber; Dec. The tracery of the side openings differs between E and W. Tie-beam roof with crown-posts and four-way struts. (Carved spandrels. LG) - FONT. Octagonal. With four lions against the stem and four angels and four flowers against the bowl. - PULPIT. Jacobean. - SCREEN. Only the dado, made into a bench. - PLATE. Elizabethan Cup.

OFFTON. From its dim past it has kept the fresh waters of a moat surrounding a green mound where Offton Castle stood about 1200 years ago, the stronghold, it is said, of the Saxon King Offa, from whom the village takes its name. A row of firs like stately sentinels screens the church, its porch bearing its age of 600 years with great serenity. There is a little Elizabethan pulpit with a round arch and foliage on each side, and two seats made from the carving of the ancient screen. The greatest treasure here is the 14th century font. On its bowl are panels with flowers and angels, St Edmund’s crown pierced by arrows appearing on one angel’s shield; and below the bowl are winged angel-heads and lions guarding the base.

Not far from the church a blacksmith’s forge and a grocer’s shop face each other, oddly sharing a painted sign; on one side is a white-aproned housewife buying groceries, and on the other the blacksmith. The grocer painted the sign and the smithy made it.

Flickr.