Grays

Locked with no keyholder SS Peter & Paul is an unprepossessing Victorian built barn of a church and is pretty much devoid of interest. It should be noted that the graveyard bears out its locked status - vandals have had a field day.

The town and the old village are on separate sites, the HIGH STREET and church to the S of the railway extending in a N—S direction, the new town to the N along the E-W highway.

ST PETER AND ST PAUL. The church is of 1846, but includes some oddly disjointed parts of a much earlier time: crossing of the C12 with almost entirely rebuilt round W and E arches; C13 N transeptal tower with double-chamfered arch and similar blank N and E arches; lancet windows; S transept shorter, with work of c. 1300 towards the crossing. The S doorway may also be C13. - FONT. Perp, octagonal, with quatrefoil panels. - SCREEN. Perp, plain. - CHAIRS. Two good later C17 arm-chairs. - TILES, some medieval tiles in the Vestry. - BRASS to a woman and her family, c. 1510.

GRAYS. Kent’s chalk crops out in this little place by the Thames: here men have found in quarries, in the silted-up bed of a lost river older than the Thames, remains of early elephants, rhinos, and hippos, as well as the shells of the freshwater mussel now extinct in England. There are a few Roman tiles in the floor of the church (rebuilt last century), with a few 13th century arches, and a 15th century font; but that is almost all, save for a Tudor screen in the tower arch and brass portraits of two Tudor ladies with six daughters of one of them.

On a wall is a tablet recalling a tragedy of the Thames when a schoolmaster and his boys were drowned in trying to escape from fire on the training ship Goliath.

Flickr.