England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Ingham St Bartholomew

The Parish

The parish of Ingham lies in northwestern Suffolk not too far from its border with neighbouring Norfolk. Ingham is located about 5 miles north of the market town of Bury St Edmunds and sits on the A134 road which connects Bury St Edmunds with Thetford. Ingham is a small and compact village with most properties set to the west of the busy A134, the road takes much heavy traffic to Bury's Sugar Beet processing factories which dominate the local skyline. Modern developments did come to Ingham in the form of the Bury to Thetford branch rail line but sadly this was a casualty of the closures of the 1960s. Ingham sits on the edge of the area of glacial sands and gravels that underlie Breckland, the soils are light and infertile and unsuitable for arable farming, unlike most of Suffolk; here the grazing of sheep & rabbits proved to be the best use of the land, much of it today sits under forestry plantation. Ingham is drained westwards by a small tributary of the River Lark which is soon joined, the Lark heads out across The Fens, joining the Great Ouse and reaching the North Sea through the port of King's Lynn. Ingham is sited at around 50 metres above the sea in gentle terrain where local heights barely reach a further 10 metres higher for some distance. Ingham parish was fairly typically sized for this area, it covered close to 1,800 acres and would have supported a population of around 200 parishioners. In Domesday times most of Ingham was in the hands of St Edmunds Abbey with a smaller share with Roger de Poitou, collectively the parish could muster 13 ploughs, the usual meadows stocked with livestock and it did possess a mill.

The Church

St Bartholomew's church stands at the southern end of the village on the eastern side of the A134 but set back some distance from that road behind mature trees. Prior to Victorian intervention St Bartholomew would have been a typical East Anglian Perpendicular church built, or probably replacing an earlier church, during that great church-building era of the late 14th or early 15th century. Only the western tower and portions of the nave survive to document that legacy. The tower is documented to 1455 for completion, and probably was the final piece of the build. The remainder of the church was drastically restored and, in the case of the chancel, completely rebuilt in the 1860s. As mentioned the A134 is a busy road and it is necessary to turn into the access drive of the church, a tricky manouevre on occasions, where part of the churchyard is made available for parking. Once past the trees the churchyard is open and with no obstructions to photography.