Home

Blyford and Sotherton are two small parishes, forming a joint council, in East Suffolk.

Now, in the 21st century, there are 141 voters on the electoral roll;

All Saints, Blyford, is part of the Blyth Valley Team Ministry, on whose website are historic details of the church. St. Andrew’s Sotherton is part of the Sole Bay Ministry.

The Queens Head pub at Blyford is opposite the church – good food and a lovely old thatched house.

Blyford is the ford on the River Blyth – the church stands at a road/river crossing – and is first recorded in c.1040. The village lies mostly along the Halesworth to Blythburgh road, with several outlying farms. Until the dissolution of the monasteries in the mid sixteenth century, land in both Blyford and Sotherton, was held by the Benedictine Priory of Blythburgh, as was the advowson of Blyford Church.

Sotherton adjoins this parish to the North and is first recorded in Domesday Book, 1086. The name means the southern estate or farmstead. Both parishes are in Blything hundred. Sotherton now consists of scattered farms and an isolated church with the remains of the village nearby, deserted in the later Middle Ages.