The combination of thatched roof, red brick and wooden bellcote of All Saints make it one of the more unusual churches I've come across but also one of the most appealing. It almost seems like a thatched cottage with parts added on!
I enjoyed walking around the very peaceful churchyard, covered in snowdrops when I visited in February.
I didn't have the chance to go inside but on his Suffolk Churches website Simon Knott says there was the silence of a small country church which has not changed much in a hundred years.
He also says that Ixworth Thorpe is famous for its bench ends. "They are part of the same nationally important group as nearby Stowlangtoft and Honington. Most memorable is the figure variously described as a harvester and a thatcher. I think he is the latter. What a lovely example of 15th century East Anglian folk art! Nearby, a lady takes her lapdog for a walk, and a mermaid holds a mirror. Among the beasts are a unicorn, a horse and a hare. There is an owl to the west, and, I think, a cockatrice, who, unlike his twin in the chancel at Honington, retains his comb.The figures are attached to 19th century benches, and some of them are one-sided, suggesting that they were once against walls."
"Everything is simple, but lovely. This is a wholly rustic space, at the heart of the fields and copses round about. There is no Ixworth Thorpe village really, and this scattered parish could not help but see its church on the hill as a focus of its identity. Inevitably then, it is a church of the ordinary people, with a sense of their continuity, and of its place in their community.
It is little known, but should be celebrated"
The cache is a nano, not within church grounds.