HISTORY OF THE AREA

It is thought that there has been a religious building on the current church site since Saxon times, although much of the current structure dates from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There is graffiti in the church which has been attributed to the fifteenth century poet John de Lydgate.

The castle has been a fortified site since Saxon times, although was rebuilt in the twelfth century. It fell into disrepair in the fourteenth century and parts of the building were used in the construction of the church.

Lidgate was once a larger settlement, at one stage comparable in size to Clare. There is some evidence that the village stretched further towards Wickhambrook.

Nearby to Lidgate, the stone bridge dates to around the fourteenth or fifteenth century and it was part of a packhorse route between Bury St Edmunds and Cambridge. Hinchliffe, in his packhorse book, notes though that “the notice alongside the bridge quotes an early fifteenth century date, but since Moulton was a market town at the end of the thirteenth century, it is possible that there was a bridge on the site to serve local market traffic before the current structure”. There was a similar bridge in nearby Kentford, but more of that in another post.

Historically, the bridge was financed by the Church and Bridges Estate which had been established in the early sixteenth century. Although they must have done a decent job for some centuries given that it’s still there, the West Suffolk county planning committee met in June 1962 to authorise expenditure of between £45 and £50 to repair the bridge. At the same time, they asked the Ministry of Works to take over the cost of repairing the bridge from the church charity.