St Mary, Flixton, Suffolk
As the Waveney twists eastwards, the rolling, tree-shrouded bluffs on either side hide narrow lanes and secrets. St Mary sits above its village, but there are no views of it until you actually enter the graveyard. If it could be seen from a distance, it would be much better known, because the tower of this important 19th century church is quite like any other in East Anglia. The architect was Anthony Salvin, a flamboyant character, who seems to have based the design of the tower here on the Saxon helm tower of the church at Sompting in Sussex. Salvin was working here in the 1850s, and earlier in the decade there had been a major restoration at Sompting, which had featured heavily in the architectural press. Perhaps it could be said that Sompting was in the contemporary zeitgeist.
This Flixton is not to be confused with its namesake some fifteen miles east on the outskirts of Lowestoft. The current St Mary, and, presumably, the original, were bankrolled by two great landed families, who owned the Flixton estate and lived at Flixton Hall. They were the Tasburghs, and then the Adairs. It was the Adair family, Lord and Lady Waveney, who rebuilt St Mary. The original tower had fallen in the 1830s, and a sketch of 1818 shows it to have been a fairly conventional affair. Many churches rebuilt in the 1860s were done in an Early English style, but Salvin's tower seems to have been intended to complement a Norman survival. Or perhaps it was a preference of the Adairs?
Be that as it may, over the next twenty years the whole church was entirely rebuilt, the nave in a familiar East Anglian Perpendicular, and the chancel in a rather more exotic Norman. There are crisp, clean lines to the whole piece, offset nicely by the cushion of green of the tight little graveyard. Walking around to the north side, there is a curious little octagonal extension at the west end of the north aisle. The startlingly pointed south porch leads into the inner door, and then down into the nave. As you would expect with those great Perpendicular windows, you step into a building only a little less light than outside, but you look east to a chancel shrouded in Norman darkness. There is a stillness, a crispness, as if Salvin and his workers had only just packed up and headed off back to London.
Within the parish are the dramatic ruins of Flixton Priory, at the top of the hill from the church. After the Reformation, it fell into the hands of the Tasburgh family, formerly of St Peter's Hall in the nearby South Elmhams. However, it is unlikely that they saw the inside of St Mary very often, for they were recusants, remaining Catholics during the Elizabethan and Stuart penal years. They are said to have retained a small community of Benedictine monks. Charles II, visiting Flixton Hall, which they built in the ruins of the priory, is reported to have said that "these popish dogs have a beautiful kennel". When the Tasburghs died out, the hall was bought by the Adairs. The Adairs lived here until the 1940s, when the estate was split up, and Flixton Hall sold. In 1950, it was demolished. The last of the Adair line died as recently as 1988.
When the church was rebuilt, the driving force seems to have been Theodosia Adair, Lady Waveney, and the octagonal, vaulted structure at the west end of the north aisle is her memorial chapel, clear glass in the gothic windows illuminating her life-size statue, the work of John Bell. As Mortlock recalls, he is most famous for the work Babes in the Wood, the centrepiece of the main 19th century gallery at Norwich Castle Museum.
A pleasant backwater, but the wider world has been touched by this place. The helpful leaflet in the church remembers a connection which is often forgotten, between the Waveney Valley and the troubled recent history of the United Kingdom. Flixton vicarage, built by the Adairs in the 1870s, was found to be surplus to requirements, and so it was given to the Flixton Estate manager to live in. In the last decade of the 19th century, this was one Captain Charles Boycott, who, having disastrously failed to fulfil the same role in on an estate in Ireland, had given his name as a new word to the English language.