Raydon - St Mary
East Anglia, and Suffolk in particular, has so many treasures of the Perpendicular period that the little jewels of the earlier Decorated stand out as being of more than usual interest. And there is more to this difference than mere architecture. It seems to have an effect upon the way the buildings are kept. Perpendicular lends itself to neatness and order; there's something about those big windows that makes people want to tidy up and polish the woodwork. Not that Decorated buildings are necessarily untidy, of course, its just that they seem so much less sterile, more organic and in touch with their ancient roots. And perhaps a bit dustier too. Raydon, like Cotton in mid-Suffolk and the chancel of the nearby Essex church of Lawford, is a perfect example of this.
The tower here collapsed in the 17th century, probably during the Commonwealth, and possibly during the great storm of September 1658, when a couple of other Suffolk steeples came down. It has been replaced by a little bell turret, but apart from this the church is all of an early 13th century piece, its Decorated tracery second only to that at Cotton, I think, in all Suffolk. Like Cotton, Raydon has not been touched up too much. The Victorians reset the glorious piscinas and window stonework in their original places. This is especially important here, for, as the church guide records, a book of hours in the University Library at Cambridge was originally prepared for Alice de Reydon, daughter of the Lord of the manor here in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The illustrations, incredibly, are set in frames which echo the contemporary tracery in the windows and piscinas here. The outstanding details of the exterior are the carvings in headstops and on pinnacles; dragons, lions and wildmen look down disapprovingly. Stepping through the porch past a fine surviving holy water stoup you step into a church that underwent a particularly sensitive restoration in 1883. This produced the pleasant furnishings and floors, but notably and mercifully did not install any stained glass, so the survivals are all medieval, and the church is enfolded in white light - again, as at Cotton.
Text courtesy of Simon Knott www.suffolkchurches.co.uk
Pictorial Puzzles
"One picture is worth ten thousand words", or often in the case of geocaching one set of coordinates.
Information may be hidden in the images themselves, Steganography, or the images may refer to outside sources of information. For example the image of a UK phone may refer to the numbers 44 and a Spanish phone the numbers 34 (country dialling code).
Typically if there are a lot of images, 13 would be ideal, then you're looking for single digits for each image.
A single image on a page suggests that the coordinates are all hidden within that one image and more likely that some form of steganography has been used. different forms of steganography include altering pixels on the image, concealing additional files within the image file, changing exif data such as names or gps coordinates. depending on the method used there are online tools to extract the information or a simple image viewer/editor may be sufficient.
Your turn :)
North:
East:
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See also the Church Micro Statistics and Home pages for further information about the series.
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