About the Benefice and the web site
The villages of Ashfield-cum-Thorpe, Cretingham and Earl Soham lie between the towns of Framlingham and Debenham, in Suffolk. The villages each have their churches: St Mary's Ashfield, St Mary's Earl Soham and St Peter's Cretingham. Ashfield-cum-Thorpe is in fact a combination of two old parishes: Ashfield and Thorpe. The hamlet of Thorpe has a disused church of St Peter's. See the history for more information.
For many years the three Anglican churches have worked and worshiped together, alongside the Baptist church in Earl Soham.
The three Anglican churches form a Benefice in the Loes Deanery, in the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.
This drawing by John Western of the three churches in the Benefice was made available for use of the Benefice, and you may also recognise it as the front cover of our Benefice magazine.
This web site contains news and information about forthcoming church events, and extracts from the Benefice magazine.
Accessibility
We have tried to conform to accessibility guidelines in creating this web site. For example, if the text size is too small (too small) to read, you can make it bigger. Use the browser menu commands "View" "Text size" (or text zoom). This feature doesn't work with most web sites using Internet Explorer (due to one of the many bugs in IE). .
If you have any comments on the content or presentation of the web site (or anything else, for that matter), do please let the webmaster know.
Web site design
The web site has been designed using so-called "CSS-P" layout. Web experts will know that this is a relatively new way of designing pages without tables or frames. The advantage is that pages download download faster, and for web site designers it is much more flexible. The disadvantage is that older browsers may not work. Specifically, browers older than Netscape 5 and Internet Explorer 5 may not display the pages properly.
I've checked it on IE 5 and later, Netscape 6 and later and Firefox 1.0 and later, but if you have any problems (eg the pages don't display properly), please drop me an email.
In fact, even modern browsers do not implement web standards fully, I'm afraid. The sharp-eyed can find a few places on this site that look different in Internet Explorer compared to other browsers. Almost always it's Microsoft Internet Explorer that doesn't follow the standards (or has bugs).
Contributions wanted
Your input for the web site and magazine is wanted!
Please provide input to me or the magazine editor, be it announcements, thank-yous, articles - anything to do with any of the three villages that you would like to see on the web site or in the magazine. Also I'm missing information about the history of the churches, especially Cretingham church. Please contact me with this or any other information you would like on this site. Finally, we're after any old photographs (negatives if possible) of the area, people events etc. both for the web site and also for the Lanman Museum (click here for details).
Photographs on the web site
Some photographs of the churches - and in future church events - are being placed on the web site. See photos. Also there is a collection of photographs, including a number of photographs of the churches in this benefice, on the Suffolk Scenes web site.
We can include photographs of village events, but where there are children in the photograph we need written permission of a parent or guardian.
Can't find it? Here's a site map.
Webmaster: simon.garrett@iee.org. What do you think of this site? Click here (or email me) to let me know.