The Creetings are a pair of villages standing in rolling land of mixed cultivation 2to 3 miles E of Stowmarket. There were once four churches; St Mary’s, St Olave’s, St Peter’s and All Saints’. The first two were small but discrete alien Benedictine priories, but St Olave’s had gone by the 17thc (although its site has been excavated recently). All Saints’ parish church was alongside St Mary’s, but was blown down by a storm in 1801 (see Creeting St Mary). The A14 trunk road slices through Creeting St Peter, with the village to the N and the church isolated to the S of the road. Although the church is only 500 yards from the centre of the village as the crow flies, it is a mile away by road. St Peter’s has a nave, chancel and W tower, all of flint, with the S nave wall mortar rendered. The nave has a plain 12thc N doorway and a 13thc. S doorway under a 14thc. flint porch. The nave windows are 14thc.-15thc., and inside is a wooden W gallery housing the organ. The chancel arch is broad and 14thc., as are the chancel windows. On the N side is a vestry, rebuilt c.2000 reusing a 14thc. window. The W tower is 14thc. too, with flowing bell-openings, diagonal western buttresses and a battlemented parapet. There is no tower arch inside the church, only a small doorway and the arch may have been blocked when the gallery was erected in the 19thc. On buttresses of the tower, porch and nave there are flushwork crosses; five surviving but Simon Knott (www.suffolkchurches.co.uk) detects signs of repairs on seven other buttresses and suggests that there were once twelve. They might have been consecration crosses, corresponding to a reconsecration after the major rebuilding of the 14thc. The church was derelict and roofless in the 18thc., and its present appearance owes much to its 19thc. restoration.
