The Ruined Church

The Ruined Church

Douglas Hine

The herring catch must have been good along the Suffolk coast in the years when they built the great church of St Andrew’s at Covehithe. Back then, this little town could boast a linen trade and a late autumn fair on St Andrew’s Day. The gothic arches of his church stood tall from the turn of the fifteenth century, through the generations of Reformation and Civil War, but by the time of the Restoration, the prosperity announced by its proportions was only a memory – and so, in 1672, the parishioners were granted permission to take off the roof and dismantle the original structure. Among the ruins, making use of the salvaged materials, they built a new and humbler church. With its thatched roof and whitewashed interior, it remains in use to this day.

Built for the Roman Catholic church in the 1960s, within twenty years the buildings of St Peter’s were abandoned. Their concrete arches became a puzzle that no one can solve...

I heard a story somewhere as a kid about a church whose roof was made from a ship: her sailing done, her masts lopped off, she ends her days upturned, sheltering worshippers from the elements.

...I am reminded that every church is already a ship...

A thought comes, or an image: maybe that’s what happens next, what you’re left with, when it’s time to take the roof off and leave the altar to receive the quiet blessing of an autumn sun. You turn the vessel upside down, you remember that it was a boat all along, that it wasn’t meant for the safety of dry land, but for heading out over dark waters, into the deep, where the fishing is not fishing at all.