Sproughton, Suffolk

All Saints, LNK but with a note helpfully stating that it's open on Wednesdays for private prayer - I don't know if this is due to covid or is normal practice. A quick search on Flickr shows that its locked status is a crying shame if only for the glass.

ALL SAINTS. Very renewed. Unbuttressed W tower. The body of the church essentially of the early C14. Excellent three-bay arcades. The piers deeply moulded with four filleted shafts and four keeled shafts in the diagonals. The hollows between are continuous. Deeply moulded capitals and arches. S doorway with two orders of filleted shafts. Chancel arch of two broad continuous chamfers. Chancel N doorway more nicely designed, with two pretty head-stops. The Double Piscina opposite has bar tracery and a gable. - STAINED GLASS. E chapel s window by Ward & Hughes, 1881 ; bad. - One N aisle window by Whall, 1924. - PLATE. Cup and Cover 1568; Flagon 1757; Paten 1758. - MONUMENTS. Mrs Bull d. 1634. Kneeling figure. Two standing angels pull away a curtain. - Metcalfe Russell of The Chantry d. 1785. Good. No effigies. Urn against a black relief obelisk. l. and r. of the inscription excessively elongated poplar trees.

SPROUGHTON. A big village on the River Gipping, it has much to remind us of days long gone. There are many old -cottages, several old houses, and a water-mill still working; and opposite the church is a pink-washed Elizabethan rectory. On a hill some way off stands Chantry House of the 18th century, with many windows overlooking magnificent grounds, now a public park. It was once the home of Sir Fitzroy Kelly, last Lord Chief Baron.

Charmingly situated among the trees, the church has a fine embattled tower of the 14th century and a clerestory of the 15th, the rest of the building being from the same two centuries. Outside two of the windows we noticed fragments of sculpture, heads of a gibbon and a bearded man; and in the south porch are old seats and a finely moulded doorway with slender shafts. The nave has arches on clustered columns, and is crowned by a hammerbeam roof with some splendid wooden angels, one of them praying, another with a book, and others with a shield, a mace, a cross, and a crozier. The vestry has a peephole, the chancel has seven old bench-ends with poppyheads, and the north aisle a lovely Whall window showing St Christopher in dark purple. There is a double canopied piscina 600 years old. There are many memorials from the last three centuries. Angels in red and white are holding back blue curtains for us to see an old lady of 76 who died in 1634. She is Elizabeth Bull, carved as a kneeling figure on a red cushion, her black dress and hat relieved by a white ruff. A quaint tablet has a winged hourglass resting on a skull, and another tells of a distinguished 18th century naturalist, Michael Collinson. Most tragic is a record of the deaths of- three brothers, one from a wound at the storming of an Indian fort in 1840, another of yellow fever the same year, and the third in China two years later.

Flickr.