England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Little Livermere St Peter & St Paul

The Parish

The parish of Little Livermere lies in northwestern Suffolk not too far from its border with neighbouring Norfolk. Little Livermere is located roughly 6 miles north of the town of Bury St Edmunds and sits about 2 miles east of the A134 road which links Bury St Edmunds with Thetford in Norfolk. Little Livermere is a lost parish not even meriting a mention on today's Ordnance Survey maps, not some deserted medieval village but one ruthlessly removed from the landscape by the owner's of Livermere Hall. In an historical quirk the funding to create the resulting parkland came largely from a fortuitous win on the state lottery. It is fair to say there was very little to remove, there being no real defined village merely scattered farms and cottages. Little Livermere sits within Suffolk's portion of Breckland, a largely infertile area of glacial deposits that saw low impact usage in the form of sheep and, a local speciality, rabbits grazing, large tracts of the surrounding land are today covered by large forestry plantations. The parish is drained by a small tributary of the River Lark, even this was modified to form the picturesque lake within the park. The Lark heads out into Fenland westwards and then northwestwards to meet the Great Ouse near Littleport eventually reaching the North Sea through The Wash. Little Livermere is sited at around 30 metres above the sea in generally rather flat terrain, land rises eastwards reaching a spot height of just 54 metres nearer Ixworth. Little Livermere parish was fairly typically sized for the area, covering just over 1,400 acres it would have supported a population of around 150 parishioners. Like so many parishes in this area, in Domesday times it was a holding of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, a rural and minor holding offering just 5 ploughs and a small meadow.

The Church

St Peter & St Paul's church is a ruin having been abandoned and de-roofed in 1947; the ruin sits alongside Park Farm (home to a fencing company) west of The Street and a half mile north of Great Livermere. The church had ancient origins, showing Anglo-Saxon long-and-short work in its northeastern corner, possibly 11th century, and with a 12th century Norman Romanesque style northern doorway. That early church was modified, as so many were, in the 14th century, the eastern end, and again in the 15th century, the complementary western end. The western tower, medieval in origin, was heightened in the 18th century and the whole church given the typical Victorian restoration. Even though its parish had been erased from the maps in the 1730s a small congregation muddled on before recognition of the inevitable forced the closure and partial dismantlement. Sadly the former church nowadays is inaccessible, the land is in private hands, and can only be viewed rather distantly from The Street.