Quendon

For some reason I have, to date, missed the bijou church of SS Simon & Jude. This is a heavily restored building packed with somewhat drab monuments, the most interesting being the framed photographs of 25 men in the Quendon 1915 roll of honour.

I also took the opportunity to re-visit, and record properly, both Newport and Saffron Walden.

CHURCH (dedication unknown). The exterior looks all 1881, the date of the restoration and the rebuilding of the S side. Inside, arcade of three bays, with circular piers and arches with two slight chamfers, i.e. early C13, but also over-restored. - LECTERN. A large standing alabaster angel, 1906. - PLATE. Cup of 1638(?).

QUENDON. It lies by the road to Saffron Walden, which runs in a valley made by a stream flowing to the River Cam. The road winds past a hundred-acre park in which the deer have roamed for centuries, and in it stands the timbered hall of Tudor days, now faced with red and blue bricks. We see it as the 17th century faced it, a handsome place with a front of six bays divided by pilasters which support a charming timbered cornice. In the grounds is an octagonal dovecot with a lead-capped lantern, and on the walls of the attics are remains of painted figures 300 years old.

The old church stands a little above the road, with six gabled windows and two arcades of the 13th century. Two of their fine columns have niches probably used for holding lights. The chancel was made new 400 years ago, but its arch is 13th century. One of the windows is in memory of John Collin, rector here for 60 years last century, and there is another with two angels in memory of a maid-of-honour to Queen Victoria.

Fine pieces of modern craftsmanship are the lectern, on which is an alabaster angel with flowing hair, and the screen given by Sir William Foot Mitchell in memory of his son-in-law; he was Captain Winter Rose, who gave his life for us, and as he lay dying made a thumbnail sketch of what he would like this screen to be. The font is modern, but the medieval font has been rescued from a ditch and is outside the door. There is a beautiful chalice of Charles Stuart’s day in the vestry, where hang two certificates recording burials in wool. From 1621 to 1792 this form of burial is in the register, and among the names of those buried in wool here we found that of Thomas Winstanley, whose son Henry built Eddystone Lighthouse. Henry’s uncle William, who also lies here, was famous in his day for his Poor Robin Almanacs. He also sold chap-books, and was a great character towards the end of the 17th century. He is said to have started as a barber in London, and then to have given up the razor to use the scissors for making up his books and almanacs.

Simon K -

Rickling is a joint parish with Quendon. On the large village green there was a cricket match in progress, the pub doing good business. It looked idyllic. One of the residents of the village is celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who grew up in neighbouring Clavering.

The road leads down to the A11, the old Norwich and Newmarket to London road, and Rickling becomes Quendon, with bigger houses but much, much more traffic, despite the fact that the M11 also passes through, going under the high street to the north. Madness.

Up an alleyway from the main road is the parish church.

Closed for repair work. The entire west end was under scaffolding and netting. I'd seen this from way back at Rickling, and had hoped it wasn't the church. Interestingly, there is a big house to the west of the church, and the owner until he died in 1995 was Stephen Dykes Bower, architect of, among other things, St Nicholas Great Yarmouth and the new bits of St Edmundsbury Cathedral. This was his hobby church - virtually everything not medieval here is by him.

I took a note of the churchwardens phone numbers so I can find out when they've finished and do this one when I come back to do Newport. And then I was crossing the M11 myself, and after a mile or so on a very steep and not very pleasant lane (it went through a quarry, which fell away on each side), I arrived in the lovely village of Widdington.

Flickr.

Stanway - All Saints

Standing in the grounds of Colchester Zoo are the ruins of All Saints church. British History Online (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=15277) says of it:

The ruined church of ALL SAINTS comprises a nave with a north porch and a west tower. Nothing survives of the 13th- or early 14th-century church comprising chancel, nave, and bell tower, the nave of which collapsed in the 1380s or 1390s. The nave was rebuilt c. 1400, and the north aisle, whose arcade survives, and the west tower may have been built at the same time. There was an alabaster reredos behind the high altar in 1477, and the 'light beam' was painted in 1521. The church was repaired by John Swinnerton (d. 1616) as a private chapel; the chancel arch and north arcade were blocked with brick, and a brick north porch bearing the Swinnerton arms was added.  By the early 18th century the church was 'utterly decayed', and has remained so.

I didn't expect to be able to see the church without having to pay for full admission to the zoo, which I would have been unwilling to do as I was on a churching trip rather than an entertaining the youngest trip, but was able to park the car and then walk back to the entrance where you get an OK view of the tower, top of the north arcade and chancel arch.

I may use some clubcard points on a summer trip.

ALL SAINTS. In the grounds of Stanway Hall. In ruins. An interesting building, consisting now only of tower and nave. The late C14 tower is of bands of flint and brick, the brick not being Roman any longer. Early in the C17 the N aisle was removed and replaced by brick windows, the N porch was added, and the chancel arch blocked and provided with a three-light brick window.

STANWAY. Its name means the stone-way by which the Romans went westward from Colchester, and its church has grown from a wayside chapel used by pilgrims. White Hart Farm close by goes back to the 15th century, and is said to have been a hospice for their shelter. Only the nave of the church is ancient, half of it being Norman, and the other half 15th century, with the porch. Roman bricks are in the angles of the walls and round the Norman windows, and a very narrow Norman doorway is made almost entirely of them. Between the chancel and the chapel is a 15th century arcade brought from a Colchester church; the font is the same age. A huge tiebeam supports the wooden bell-turret, and one of the Norman windows has modern glass of an angel blowing a trumpet, a charming memorial by four little children to their father.

A mile down the lane we come to the Tudor hall which treasures a handsome stone fireplace; and close to it stands the ruin of the original village church, deserted for centuries. Most of the tower and nave are 600 years old, and the roof is thought to have been torn down to supply the parliament men with material at the great siege of Colchester.

Colchester - All Saints, Shrub End

All Saints, Shrub End is a hideous Victorian red brick beast of a church; it was, as expected, locked. I'm afraid I can find no redeeming features.

Neither Pevsner nor Mee visited.

Flickr.

Fingringhoe

St Andrew is another out of place Suffolkesque church but this time well south of Colchester and so is even more incongruous. Simply put it has a stunning exterior and an interesting, though minimalist interior - wallpainting remains, unusual corbels, a 1655 monument to a rather scary looking George Frere and a brass to John Alleyne and his daughter are among the highlights.

The church is kept locked but is open on the first weekend of each month and between May and August on the 3rd Sunday as well. A keyholder is listed for those visiting at other times.

ST ANDREW. Visually quite exceptionally successful, owing to position, the view to the E, and the little pond with oak trees below to the W, and also to upkeep. The merit is that of not having done too much. A slight impression of neglect can be an asset. The nave is Norman, see the quoins on the N side and one complete and one fragmentary window (discovered in 1928), all with much Roman brick. Tower, S aisle and chancel C14. The tower has bands of stone and flint, flint and stone chequerwork at the base, added brick buttresses only below, and above a parapet but not battlements. Flint S porch with battlements of stone and flint chequer. Embattled S aisle. Large red, tiled roofs. White and plain interior. The S arcade is no more than a cutting of pointed arches through the Norman S wall. - FONT-COVER. Tall, octagonal, of wood, much repaired. Buttresses with pinnacles at the angles. Plain panels between ending in traceried heads. Plain second stage. Top stage with openwork ogee ribs carrying a finial. - DOOR in the S doorway, traceried, C14, badly preserved. - PAINTINGS. Unusually much still visible, even if only faintly. The most interesting remains are of a St Christopher above the N doorway, on the piers of the S arcade Virgin, St Michael and a seated Woman, Christ as Man of Sorrows. - MONUMENTS. Brass to John Alleyn, c. 1600. - George Frere d. 1655. Good frontal demi-figure, hand on a skull. In an oval niche framed by a wreath. Curly segmental pediment on top. No doubt the work of a good sculptor of the day.

FINGRINGHOE. A cheerful village on a slope of the valley of the Roman River is this, with thatched cottages and oak trees in a hollow by a pond. One of its roads runs down to a ferry across the estuary to the quaint village of Wivenhoe. Here lived the Romans; many of their red bricks are mixed with the flint and limestone rubble of the walls of the church. We come into this old place by a porch with sculptures of St Michael and the Dragon in the spandrels of its outer doorway; its inner doorway shelters a splendid 500-year-old door with the original iron handle. Stepping down into the church the eye meets on the Norman piers the paintings that stood clear in medieval times, and we can still distinguish Michael and a seated figure with long hair, wearing an ermine tippet. On the walls, too, are traces of painting of the 14th and 16th centuries. More definite are grotesque white faces grinning down from the dark beams curving round the white barrel roof. Resting on a bier of the 17th century is a hollowed-out chest much older than the date on it, and there is a great treasure of oak in the font cover, 500 years old, rising in three stages to a richly moulded terminal high above our.heads. It has carving of the greatest delicacy. There is a brass with the portraits of John Alleyn and his little daughter, in Elizabethan clothes.

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East Donyland

St Lawrence is one of the more extraordinary churches I've visited so far. Victorian built, it is an octagonal brick building and looks more like a baptist meeting hall or a water tower than a church. Much against my better judgement I found myself rather liking its eccentricity. Locked of course.

ST LAWRENCE. 1838 by William Mason of Ipswich. Quite remarkably original. An  octagonal church of white brick, in the lancet style. Groups of five stepped lancets on three sides, entrances on two others, and three lancets above the altar. - MONUMENT. Elizabeth Marshall D. 1613. Frontally seated woman, full-length, flanked by obelisks. Below in the ‘predella’ one kneeling daughter and two babies in cradles. Long inscription which reads as follows:

Clotho: In tender armes thy tickle rocke I beare
Wherin consists of life this hemispher
Frayle flyinge fadeinge fickle sliperye
Certaine in nothing but uncertaintye

Lachesis: From of thy rocke her slender thred I pull
When scarce begun but yt my spoole is full
Then tyme begetts bringes forth & with her haste
Makes after tyme tymes former workes to waste

Atropos: I with my knife have cutt that thred in twayne
And loosde that knott not to be knitt agayne
What two wer one my knife hath both opposd
In heaven her soule in earth her corpes inclosd.

The verses are attributed to Gilbert Longe, then vicar of East Donyland.

EAST DONYLAND. It is an old village running down a slope to the compact little hamlet of Rowhedge on the tide-swept banks of the River Colne. Ships are built on its quay, and small yachts moored in its creeks. But in this old place is no ancient church, only a modern one built of brick, its pews curving on an octagonal floor so that it looks like a chapter house. From the church that has vanished comes the brass portrait of Nicholas Marshall and his wife of Charles Stuart’s day; we are told of his wife that she surrendered her soul "with alacrity of spirit." A neighbour they must have known, Elizabeth Marshall, sits with hand upraised expounding from a book, a sculpture in marble.

Simon K -

I headed eastwards from Berechurch into the parish of East Donyland. This exists in name only, there is no village, just a hall, but in the 19th Century there grew up on the south bank of the Colne the township of Rowhedge.

I was suprised that the road signs suggested that I head back into central Colchester and then out again, when my map clearly showed a lane leading directly across to the place, but this turned out to be a gated road, the gate with a sign saying 'This gate is closed when Live Firing is taking place'. Fortunately it was open, although there were more warning signs all the way along the verge.

I eventually came to St Lawrence. Locked, no keyholder notice. The sign outside says 'Parish of East Donyland'.

The setting is wholly urban, the churchyard surrounded by 19th century terraced streets punctuated by the surprise of wooden sail lofts.

Now, I'm not saying that I would not have gone inside had it been open, but the significant thing here is the architecture, for unusually this is an octagonal church in white brick of 1838, wholly un-ecclesiological but, as you see by the date, just Victorian. The architect was William Mason of Ipswich. It looks extremely odd, like an eastern temple shoehorned into a 19th Century housing estate. It was hard to work out which way was east without an apse.

I knew I was now entering an area of fearsomely locked churches, and I would have liked to have seen inside, but I was glad I'd seen the exterior. I wandered down to the Quayside, a lovely area of 18th and 19th Century buildings, albeit with some modern apartments, and people sitting outside pubs on the waterside.

A few hundred yards down river on the opposite bank is Wivenhoe, with people sitting outside the pub there. If I had waved to them they would probably have waved back, and it where I was bound, but it would take me nearly ten miles to cycle to get it.

Flickr.

Colchester - Old Heath

On my way to East Donyland I passed, and stopped at, Old Heath Chapel which until then I'd never heard of. Old Heath Chapel was erected in 1869 as an outreach mission for Lion Walk Congregational Church. It is largely of corrugated iron structure and was known locally as the 'Tin Tabernacle'. The chapel was enlarged in 1888 and again in 1898. In the 1980s when Lion Walk became a United Reformed church, Old Heath became independent and retained its congregational status.

I'm rather pleased that this is the 500th church I've recorded.

 Neither Pevsner nor Mee mention it.

Wivenhoe

Wivenhoe, on the tidal banks of the River Colne, is an utterly charming place particularly when the sun is out and it's 30 degrees in the shade! Its inhabitants, or perhaps it's the tourists, are plainly not to be trusted as St Mary the Virgin is kept tightly locked.

This is a run of the mill Victorian restored exterior (actually not  a restoration but a re-build following an earthquake) but the tower with its cupola is nice. I would have like to see for myself the brasses Pevsner mentions, not least because they appear in the family tree.

ST MARY THE VIRGIN. W tower of c. 1500 with diagonal buttresses. On top a wooden cupola, C18? The rest is 1860 (by Hakewill) and of no interest. - FONT. Octagonal, Perp, with quatrefoils and shields. - STAINED GLASS. A good deal that is evidently of c. 1860. - CHEST. Foreign, C16, with elaborate arabesque decoration and ornamental handles. - PLATE. Cup of 1562; C17 Paten; Flagon of 1709. - BRASSES. William Viscount Beaumont d. 1507, figure of c. 4 ft length but with a triple canopy with crocketed gables etc. which makes the whole plate 9 ft long. Same length the plate for Elizabeth, widow of Viscount Beaumont and wife of the Earl of Oxford d. 1537, The figure is larger, also in an architectural surround. - Thomas Westeley d. 1535, chaplain to the Countess of Oxford; in mass garments.

WIVENHOE. An old fashioned little town five miles down the Colne from Colchester, it has a quay facing the River Roman, a tributary from the west. Here they cultivate oysters and build yachts. The High Street has houses 300 years old, one or two with elaborate plaster decoration of foliage and trees. Overhanging storeys, gables, and carved bargeboards give charm to these old buildings, though it was sad to see Wivenhoe, a member of the Kent Cinque Port of Sandwich, fallen on hard times.

In the churchyard is a magnificent group of chestnuts. Most of the church was made new after an earthquake in 1884, but the bold tower of 1500 stood firm in the shock, and the 14th century arcades of the nave, some brasses, and a few old gravestones, and many moulded stones remain.

A splendid monument in the church is the brass portrait of Lord William Beaumont, who was buried here in 1507; his head rests on a helm bearing a lion crest and his feet are on an elephant which carries a castle. An elaborate triple canopy with gables and pinnacles shelters this great armoured figure. His widow married John, Earl of Oxford, and was laid to rest here in 1537. Her figure is also in brass, resplendent in a heraldic cloak and a pedimental headdress with a coronet; it has a triple canopy and an embattled super-canopy as well, a magniicent brass for so late a period. The countess lived in Wivenhoe Hall, and the wing with crowstepped gables built in her lifetime still stands. Toward Colchester is Wivenhoe Park, a well wooded estate in which deer wander over 200 up-and-down acres.

Simon K -

I at last broke free of Colchester's urban sprawl, because between me and the next church was Wivenhoe Park, campus home of the University of Essex, and beyond it Wivenhoe is a delightful little waterside town, with the one crimp that its church is St Mary. 

Locked, no keyholder. This is a large, ugly church, completely rebuilt in the 1880s by the barbarian Edward Hakewill who inflicted punishment without mercy on so many East Anglian village churches. 

The sign said 'the church may be open weekends in summer' - well, excuse me for a moment while I let off rockets in celebration. But the quayside is utterly lovely, and I could not resist the temptation to sit outside the pub, my feet on the water's edge, with a pint. I looked up towards Rowhedge, but nobody was waving.

Flickr.

Elmstead

SS Anne & Laurence - a rather odd looking church - was, sadly, locked. I say sadly because I had wanted to see the wooden effigy of a knight therein contained and the rather nice glass which I'd seen on Flickr. The rest of the interior looked rather plain.

An unusual feature are two scratch dials side by side to the west of the south door - something I've not seen before.

ST ANN AND ST LAURENCE. The N side should be examined first. It has a display of a doorway and some windows giving a complete chronology of the church, from the Norman doorway with Roman brick surround by way of the two-light windows with Y-tracery (c. 1300) in the chancel, to the C14 and early C15. The church is essentially C14. Tower over the porch not higher than the nave roof; W window like those in the chancel. The best architectural feature is the S chapel, again early C14. It has an arcade of two bays with a quatrefoil pier and an arch of two quadrant mouldings and in addition wall-shafts and wall-arches against the S wall. Contemporary Piscina on demi-shafts. Also early C14 the Sedilia and Piscina in the chancel. The cusped arches have hood-moulds resting on heads of exceptionally fine quality and gratifyingly unrestored. The E window unfortunately has been reduced in size, see the outside. It must originally have given the chancel great breadth and dignity. Unusual features in the church are the quatrefoil squint S of the chancel arch and the three ‘low side windows’, one in the chancel and two in the S chapel. They have recently been fitted with C14 bits of STAINED GLASS from the E window. - DOOR (behind the pulpit) with C12 iron-work. - COMMUNION RAILS with C18 balusters. - Box Pews early C19. - IRON CR0ss with highly scrolly decoration; it was a hat-rack originally; the date perhaps c. 1800. - PLATE. Elizabethan Cup with bands of ornament and Paten on foot. - MONUMENTS. Oak efligy of a cross legged Knight. His feet rest against a female figure. - BRASS. Two hands holding a heart inscribed Credo. Dated c. 1500 by Haines.

ELMSTEAD. It has old cottages where the roads from Harwich and Walton meet, inns that have seen many centuries go by, a timbered hall 400 years old, and a roughly built church enshrined in trees. Begun in the 14th century, the church has a chancel nearly as big as the nave, and an unfinished tower with red tiles peeping out oddly among the trees. Here are fine stone seats with a king and a bishop carved on them 600 years ago, and a tablet telling us that an old vicar buried his little son the year before the plague came to London. The epitaph tells us that as careful mothers put their babes to sleep when they would play the wanton too long, so Nature put this little one to bed betimes to save his youth from harm. The chief possession of Elmstead is an old wooden figure, one of very few in Essex, showing a cross-legged knight with his feet on a woman, a strange piece of carving thought to be a memorial of Lawrence de Tony, who died about 1310. There are only a small number of these wooden figures in all England, probably a hundred.

Flickr.

Ardleigh

St Mary the Virgin is a decidedly Suffolkesque looking church quite out of keeping with it's nearest neighbours but more akin to the further north Dedham and Stratford St Mary. The south porch and tower are particularly fine but the interior suffered a Victorian makeover (with the chancel being transformed into my idea of décor from hell).

It was, however, open so I will cut it a major slice of slack for that and the exterior.

ST MARY. W tower of c. 1500: brick with diagonal buttresses and pinnacled battlements of flint and brick decoration. S porch of about the same date. Extremely elaborate East Anglian work, all flint inlay and stone. Decorated walls and battlements. Pinnacles with figures. Two figures of lions couchant as stops of the hood-mould of the doorway. In the spandrels of the doorway lively figures of St George and the Dragon. Above the doorway three niches. The inner doorway has angels in the spandrels and also a niche above. Side-openings of three lights with Perp tracery - the pattern identical with that of the aisles at Brightlingsea. The rest of the church by Butterfield 1881, except for the W bay of the nave. Butterfield enjoyed the ornate medieval parts, but his forms are bigger. In the interior he is here very restrained. - SCREEN. Dado only, with pretty traceried panels. - DOOR, c. 1500, elaborately traceried. -  PLATE. Cup of 1584; Paten probably of the same date; both with bands of engraved ornament.

ARDLEIGH. It must have been an ancient home of men, as it has enriched the great museum of Colchester with Stone Age relics; but we found it gay with flowers and glorious with cornfields, for it has great nurseries and many farms. Ardleigh Hall has fine medieval timbers. There is a timber cottage of the 15th century near the church, and many quaint buildings go back 300 years.

The splendid tower of the church is 15th century, and in it hangs a bell cast in the years that followed Agincourt. The flint and stone work of the south porch is medieval, but the three old niches above the richly carved doorway have modern sculpture, and in their spandrels are St George and the Dragon. Crowned lions flank the door and two beasts sit on shafts running up from the buttresses. The doorway itself has quaint sculptures of Adam and Eve, and the door, with traceried heads, has been on its hinges for 450 years. The church has fine tracery in the base of an ancient screen rich in carvings of foliage, grotesque heads, and dragons.

Flickr.

Simon K.

West Bergholt

I set off to cover the remaining villages surrounding Colchester with low expectations and wasn't disappointed - 6 out of 9 churches visited were locked and 1 was inaccessible unless I paid to visit Colchester Zoo.

First up was the old church of St Mary, now in the care of the CCT, which, despite a notice stating that it was open to all, was firmly padlocked (in my experience this is unusual for a CCT church). I'm not sure that I missed much as a peer through the plain windows showed a pretty stripped out interior.

ST MARY. Nave, lower chancel, belfry, and early C14 S aisle with Dec windows and low arcade of octagonal piers and double-chamfered arches. Early C18 W gallery on Tuscan columns with triglyph frieze.

St Mary the Virgin in Bergholt itself is an ugly Victorian chapel.

WEST BERGHOLT. Stone Age men dropped implements here which our own generation has picked up, and signs of the Romans have come to light, so old is this village near Colchester. One of its farms has been using two doorways for 500 years, and another is 16th century. The church stands near a fine red house and most of it is 600 years old. Its wooden turret may be 15th century, but the work of the 14th century men is seen in the arches of the nave, the timbers ofthe porch, and the moulded plates in the roofs. There is an old door with ironwork by a long-forgotten smith, a font bowl possibly 700 years old, a quaint little gallery with the royal arms, a few scraps of glass as old as the church, and a big Tudor chest with six hinges. At each end of the building is panelling of the 17th century about the same age as the fine lectern with its elaborate decoration.

Flickr.

Great Henny

Upon leaving Middleton the heavens opened with a serious deluge which may have biased my view of St Mary - but I think that even on  the brightest day she wouldn't have a lot to offer. I liked the roof angels with two grotesques in the east end but that was about it - a soulless, aisless over-restored church, although I did enjoy the newspaper articles about the woodpeckers who'd declared war on the wooden spire.

ST MARY. Nave and chancel without division; W tower. The lower parts of the tower are Norman, the diagonal buttresses and the broach-spire C15 or later. The rest of the church is C14, except for one Early Tudor brick window in the S side and the absolutely plain brick S porch. The only things calling for attention are the Sedilia, two seats with cusped pointed arches on detached shafts, and the nave roof with tie-beams on shallow arched braces, and queen-posts. - STAINED GLASS. E window, 1860, looks as if it might be Hardmans. - BRASS to William Fyscher and wife, c. 1530, with children; small figures, the parents only c. 10 ins.

GREAT HENNY. Much of its tower is Norman, and one of the bells has been ringing 500 years. The church was refashioned in the 14th century, and given a new brick porch 200 years later. In the opposite doorway a 15th century door is still opening and closing.There is a sanctuary chair 300 years old, finely carved, and a table in the vestry as old. A chest thought to have come from Italy in the 16th century is now the altar of the children’s chapel; and on the chancel wall are brass portraits of William Fyscher, his wife Anne, and their 15 children, all in the costume of Henry the Eighth’s day. With windows jutting from its thatched roof is the quaint village hall, a pair of cottages transformed for this good purpose by the men of the parish themselves. One who must have loved all these things in the 18th century was Jacob Brome, rector for 57 years.

Simon K -

The early sun was shining in a clear blue sky when I left Ipswich, but by the time I reached Sudbury there was, as predicted, a wintry shower. I waited for the worst of it to pass, and then set off through Ballingdon over the border into Essex and to Middleton (already visited), climbing ever higher on narrower, windier and hillier lanes, up through Henny Street and then on towards Great Henny. 

This is hilly country, and Great Henny church crowns the highest of them, above the village and away from the houses as if it were a castle. The rain began again as I passed through Henny Street, and as I turned into the wind a mile or so short of my destination it worsened. As I reached the bottom of the track which leads up to the top of the hill, I looked down at my waterproof top and saw white flakes accumulating - snow! It didn't last however, and by the time I reached the sanctuary of the top it had stopped. I parked my bike in the porch of the church.

Open. It has a rather forbidding appearance, a long hall of a church and the tower surmounted by a tall 18th century spire, but I needn't have worried. This is a really friendly, welcoming church. It is part of the 'pilgrim places' network, a nationwide organisation of churches and other buildings which promise to welcome pilgrims and travellers. This church is always open, guarded by a row of cottages on the side of the churchyard.

Inside, all is 19th Century, though pleasantly so. As I started looking around the sun came out, so I went outside to do the exterior. The odd structure on the edge of the churchyard is a dummy spire designed to encourage woodpeckers to attack it and not the church spire!

A curiosity of this area is that all the churches are anglo-Catholic in character to some degree, and several have glass by the Birmingham-based Hardman workshop, who ordinarily supplied catholic churches and are relatively uncommon in Anglican churches. This seems too much of a coincidence not to be significant.

I liked this church a lot, despite the alarming marble font and not having terribly much of interest other than a few rescued brasses pinned to the wall.

As part of their 'pilgrim place' status, they sell packets of lupin and honesty to scatter as you go about your pilgrimage. Not sure what the Essex Trust for Nature Conservation would make of that, but I bought some anyway.

Flickr.

Middleton

I've tried to find All Saints a couple of times previously without success but armed with a postcode I finally tracked it down and, to be honest, was seriously disappointed at first sight.

The very drab exterior conceals a seriously exciting Norman carcass  the first hint of which is the fantastic south door and inside the chancel arch is equally good. To the west of the arch is what appears to be an old doorway and in the nave are two similar recesses - purpose unknown.

The chancel has four good, modern, poppyheads, an elaborate ledger stone to Sire James Samson d.1349 and a wooden Bas relief Tudor coat of arms.

ALL SAINTS. Nave, chancel and belfry. The church was at the time of writing in a very neglected state. The S porch had fallen in and the spire was reduced to a timber skeleton. Yet the church is of some importance, especially for its Norman features. The S doorway has colonnettes with scalloped capitals and two orders of zigzag. The chancel arch has columns also. The inner order is of a remarkable design. Polygonal shafts decorated down each side by a chain of triangles. Another such column is now (re-used?) in a C13 recess at the E end of the S aisle. The capitals are scalloped or with volutes and slight leaf decoration. The chancel arch above the columns has decorated abaci. The arches are provided with a zigzag moulding and another with zigzags and a kind of stylized tongues lapping into them. In the nave N and S walls two identical C14 recesses on short triple shafts. - DOOR with traceried panels, C15; in a bad state. - STAINED GLASS E window, in the style of Warrington. - PAINTING. Annunciation, by a follower of Titian. A good picture, and ought to be looked after. - MONUMENT. Incised slab to James Samson, a priest d. 1349, 7 ft long. The style is Flemish rather than English, with an elaborate architectural surround, but the slab is of Purbeck marble, and we know too little of such pieces to decide against English authorship. The head of the figure unfortunately is renewed.

MIDDLETON. It clusters under a hill in the Gainsborough country, its small church with the rectory shaded by the fine beeches of the park. The 19th century spire, rising above the old timbered turret, looks down on the Norman walls of the chancel and the nave; we come into them through a doorway much as the Normans left it, with their round shafts, their zigzag on the arch, and their handsome capitals. Still swinging on its hinges is a door with the beautiful tracery of a medieval carpenter. There is a 16th century chest with quaint ironwork, and a painting of the Annunciation of the same age. In the floor of the chancel is a stone engraved with the portrait of James Samson, a rector of nearly 600 years ago, under a pinnacled canopy. The oak reredos is in memory of a rector who followed him after 500 years and stayed for over two generations. He came in 1823 and was rector till he died in 1889, aged 95. It is one of the most remarkable cases of long service we have come upon, for this rector, Oliver Raymond, followed his father Samuel who was rector for 54 years before him, so that father and son preached in this church for 120 years, through all the life of Napoleon and the French Revolution, through all the rise of modern England till after Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

Simon K -

The Suffolk market town of Sudbury is bordered on two sides by the most intensely rural part of the neighbouring county of Essex. Here, remote from the bureacrats at County Hall in Chelmsford, the narrow lanes are unspoiled, the villages untouched. It is like stepping back in time.

Middleton, less than a mile to the south of Sudbury, was the scene of extraordinary events in the early 1930s. The Rector of the Anglican church in this parish of less than a hundred people, Father Clive Luget, reported a series of visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

An unmarried man, he arrived at Middleton from east London in 1931. On the evening of 11th December 1932, Luget witnessed the Crucifixion floating in light for five minutes above the graveyard, and the Blessed Virgin kneeling before it. Two days later, a seven year old boy called Francis Thornber had a vision of the church as it would have been in the Middle Ages. The Virgin Mary appeared to him, and gave him messages, but told him not to repeat them yet.

As the weeks went by, Luget and the Thornber boy had many more visions of the Virgin Mary. Sometimes the figure appears to be dazzling white, reported Luget. At other times, it is blue and about five feet six inches in height. The figure is of a young woman in a long flowing robe. Her hair is covered, but she has a most beautiful face. You cannot see her feet. With the appearance I had a distinct feeling of warm rays just as you feel when the sun strikes you.

The visions were publicised widely, and curious visitors flocked to Middleton. Luget hoped that the village would become the English Lourdes. He was probably partly motivated by the ghostly events attracting visitors to neighbouring Borley Rectory, a mile or so off, but also by the unprecedented success of Alfred Hope Patten's Marian shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk.

Luget's services became more and more extreme. He gave up all Anglican liturgies in favour of the Latin Mass, which was celebrated daily with clouds of incense. Congregations were rarely above 25 people, but hundreds of others would gather outside to see what would happen, including large crowds from the Ipswich-based Protestant Truth Society, who came to picket the Mass. Luget was reported to the Bishop of Chelmsford as a Papist.

Gradually, people lost interest, but Luget continued to have visions. Five clairvoyants saw Mary at the foot of the Cross in the Summer of 1933, and several extreme and bizarre people joined Luget's congregation. A hymn was written in honour of the visions. Luget obtained written statements from people who saw the visions, and were spoken to by the Blessed Virgin. Many were children, but one was a magistrate.

By the late 1930s, Luget was seeing angels on a daily basis. As his parishioners and acolytes lost patience, the congregations gradually fell away, until no one came to the services anymore. Luget claimed to be receiving written messages from a medieval monk, Brother Bramarte, which he had found written in pencil on the wall of the Rectory cellar.

With the parish moribund, and the church falling into an advanced state of decay, the Bishop intervened. Luget was quietly retired, and died on the 28 April 1952 in hospital in Sudbury.

Today, no trace of Luget's incumbency at Middleton survives. No mention of him, or the extraordinary events of those times, is to be found in the church guide, which appears to have been written shortly after Luget's departure. The strangest memory the unsuspecting visitor will take away of the church will be the large, tame black swan which patrols the graveyard.

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Borley

Having previously researched Borley church (as noted in my Liston entry its dedication is unknown) I knew that it was kept locked and that no keyholder would be listed. This is because, somewhat odd as it may seem, the church is reputed to be Britain's most haunted church and as a consequence they shun the public.

The church is surrounded with yew topiary and sits in a beautiful spot - the view across the Stour valley towards Long Melford is stunning.

CHURCH (Dedication unknown). A topiary walk to the porch is the most notable feature of the church. The nave may be C11, see the sw quoin. The chancel and the W tower are Late Perp, the tower with thin diagonal buttresses and stepped battlements. - MONUMENTS. Sir Edward Waldegrave d. 1561 and wife d. 1599. Tomb-chest with recumbent effigies under a six-poster. The columns have shaft-rings. Straight top with big achievement. - Magdala Southcote d. 1592; with big kneeling figure; not good. - Black marble floor slab to Humphrey Burrough d. 1757, rector of Borley and Gainsborough’s uncle.

BORLEY. Its people look across the Stour valley into Suffolk from the churchyard, which has some remarkable clipped yews, like umbrellas with round frills and huge round bases. The church tower, like the chancel and the porch, is Tudor, but the thick south wall of the nave may be 400 years older. There is a bell old enough to have rung for the defeat of the Armada, a 17th century doorway made of wood, a 15th century nave roof with embattled wall-plates, and a little bench with two poppyheads carved 500 years ago. In the chancel we see Magdala Southcote of 1598 kneeling at a desk, and in the nave is the great canopied tomb, 14 feet high, of Sir Edward Waldegrave and his wife Frances, who outlived him by 38 years. At her feet sits a squirrel with its paws to its mouth, and kneeling round the tomb are three sons and three daughters. The canopy rises on six Corinthian columns. Sir Edward was a Tudor Master of the Wardrobe. As an officer of Mary Tudor’s household he was put in the Tower in King Edward’s reign for refusing to prevent the princess from celebrating mass, but was set free on account of his health. On Mary’s coming to the throne he continued to serve her but objected to her marriage with Philip of Spain, so that his feelings were overcome by a pension of 500 crowns. On the accession of Queen Elizabeth he was thrown into the Tower again for allowing mass to be said in his house; and in the Tower he died, being buried in the chapel.

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Simon K.

Borley is a tiny hamlet not far from the high street of the large Suffolk village of Long Melford. It became, in the 1930s, the focus of notoriety thanks to the activities of a conman and self-proclaimed 'ghost hunter' called Harry Price. Price elaborated on the hoaxing and spoofing of the successive Rectors and their families of the time. As a result of his books, Borley Rectory became known as 'the most haunted house in England'. The hokum and fakery still attract a lunatic fringe of sensation-seekers with nothing better to do, and hence the church is ordinarily kept locked, unusually for north Essex.

An unlikely knock-on effect of the events at Borley was what happened at nearby Middleton - one might even imagine there was something in the water around here which led to such shameless self-delusion.

This, from the Observer for 31.12.2000:

In We Faked the Ghosts of Borley Rectory, Louis Mayerling - for whom the house was a second home until its destruction by fire in 1938 - reveals for the first time how the 'hauntings' were created by the rectory's various inhabitants. He describes how they watched in amazement as the world fell for the elaborate hoax.

An investigation carried out by the BBC the year before the fire, when Mayerling was 26, noted more than 2,000 incidents of paranormal activity and concluded that the hauntings were true. The Most Haunted House in England, a book by Harry Price, the most eminent psychical investigator of the time, who lived in the house for a year, cemented the rectory's position as the best documented case of haunting in the annals of psychical research.

'Harry's book became a sort of bible and foundation of knowledge to the thousands who, in that age of psychic phenomena, were keen to believe,' said Mayerling. 'Before long, Borley Rectory stories were practically a daily occurrence in the London newspapers: at the height of it all, we were visited by dozens of coaches packed with ghost-hunters each day. People were coming from as far away as America.

'I would love to say that there was a grain of truth in it all, but I felt that the book had to be written to reveal the farcical truth about the house - as personally experienced.'

George Bernard Shaw, T.E. Lawrence, Sir Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, and Bernard Spilsbury, the Home Office criminal forensic scientist, were firm believers in the hauntings and attended séances at Borley. Even now, belief in the hauntings has remained so powerful that the case is still held up by believers as incontrovertible proof of the supernatural.

Mayerling arrived in the house, on the Essex-Suffolk border, in 1918 to find the eccentric Rev Harry Bull and his family of 14 children taking active delight in perpetuating local stories of a spectral nun, a family ghost and paranormal activity in the area.

'The house was the embodiment of eccentricities of many kinds,' Mayerling remembered. He reveals in the book how a 'magic piano' that the Bulls claimed was played by spirit hands was in fact activated by the six-year-old Mayerling plucking the piano strings with a poker from the safety of a nearby gap in the wall.

The infamous examples of poltergeist activity were perpetrated by various servants and children who were, Mayerling claims, encouraged by the Bulls to exploit the house's many hidden doors and passages. 'The example of paranormal activity that was given most publicity was the ringing of the servants' bells,' said Mayerling. 'That was simply activated by prodding the servants' bells through the barred windows over the well in the kitchen passage.'

Britain's fascination with Borley peaked in the Thirties, when the Rev Lionel Foyster took over the parish with his wife Marianne. Foyster found it hard to survive on his church stipend of £6 a week, and he and his wife decided that boosting the ghostly reputation of Borley was the best way to make ends meet.

Mayerling, who had returned to live in the house with the Foysters, tells how the couple installed a new water heater which emitted heavy knocking sounds and proclaimed themselves horrified by the noises, and pitted the skirting boards with phosphorus powder which catches fire when exposed to the air.

The couple encouraged Mayerling, still just a teenager, to walk the gardens at dusk in a black cape and turned-up collar - giving birth to the myth of a headless monk who took to writing cryptic messages on the walls of the house.

'Probably to save costs at Borley, sea-sand had been used in the walls in place of the regulation material. This caused a permanent dampness which swallowed up anything written on them in a matter of hours,' Mayerling said. 'Nevertheless, many scholars recognised the wall-writings as being genuine poltergeist activity and they were illustrated in the press across the world, adding a great stimulus to psychical research and Spiritualism.'

The real ghosts of Borley, of course, are the Waldegrave family, lords of the manor in late medieval times, and memorialised in wide-eyed terror in effigy on their rustic tomb of about 1600.

Liston

Onwards to Liston and its church whose dedication is unknown - strangely this applies to both Liston and Borley - which I found locked with no keyholder named. Quite why this should be is beyond me but ours is not to wonder why.

I'd have liked to gain access as the Norman door and C15th glass sound interesting.

Pevsner: CHURCH. Nave and chancel Norman, see the masonry at the E end, and the plain, blocked N doorway. The chancel was widened in the C13, but the windows are all renewed. W tower, not too big, early C16, of brick with blue brick diapers, diagonal buttresses, a three-light brick W window, and stepped battlements on a trefoiled corbel frieze. The stair turret reaches higher than the tower. The S chancel chapel was added in 1867. - FONT. Octagonal, Perp, traceried stem, and bowl with cusped panels and shields. - BENCH ENDS with two poppyheads. - STAINED GLASS. N window, in the tracery, several small C15 figures. - PLATE. Large Plate of 1683; Paten on foot probably of 1683; Flagon of 1702; Cup probably of 1702. LISTON HALL has been demolished.

LISTON. Its fine red tower is Tudor brickwork, and stands in a churchyard with neatly trimmed yews, by the side of Liston Hall park. One of the two bells is older than the tower, but far older than both is the Norman nave, which has a small doorway ornamented in the 12th century with zigzags and flowers. The chancel was made wider in the 13th century, but has kept its Norman wall at the east. A Tudor door is still swinging in the porch, and inside are handsome roofs 400 years old, that in the chancel having four angels looking down. A 15th century beam takes the place of the chancel arch, and there is a 15th century font, poor battered thing. The chancel has a medieval wooden seat, and the organist has a 17th century stool. One of the windows is delightful with glass new and old. It has nine charming roundels of Bible scenes, and in the tracery are figures coloured 500 years ago, the clearest being the Madonna holding a palm leaf and an orb. The others are probably St Anne, St George, Mary Magdalene, and St Michael. The church has a pathetic link with one of the most tragic events in the history of the Empire, the Massacre of Cawnpore. We read here how  Robert Thornhill, his wife, their two little ones, and a faithful nurse, were cruelly massacred after 66 days and nights of extreme suffering; and how Henry Thornhill and his family had already been murdered at Neetapore in those bitter days of the Mutiny.

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Foxearth

Inspired by my one off visit to Kelvedon on Tuesday last I planned a proper visitation for Friday going to Foxearth, Liston, Borley, Newton, Polstead, Assington, Middleton and Great Henny finishing off the area south and west of Sudbury.

I've been to SS Peter & Paul on a previous occasion but failed to post either a blog or a Flickr entry - perhaps I'd run out of camera disc space.

Both visits found it locked with no keyholder listed and both times I came away thinking the tower looked like a Victorian water tower and that this was a cold and bleak site. A quick Google search shows that the tower was added in 1862 (hence the water tower look) and that most of the interior is a Victorian re-hash.

ST PETER AND ST PAUL. The main effect is Victorian (1885 by J. Clarke): externally the rather over ornate W tower of 1862 with unusual bell-openings (fine tall cusped lancets in a row on each side), internally the decoration everywhere by wall paintings and under the tower even by mosaics. But the chancel is of c. 1340 with a three-light E window with flowing tracery, and the N arcade may be of the same date: slim octagonal piers and double-chamfered arches. The N windows are Perp, the S windows renewed or new. - SCREEN. Only the dado with over-restored painted figures of saints is original. -  STAINED GLASS. Mostly of c. 1860 and good of its date.

FOXEARTH. A little village in the countryside Gainsborough knew so well, it is notable for a moated 15th century hall that is now a farmhouse, a 15th century cottage that is now a post office, and a medieval church much restored last century when the porch and tower were built, but still keeping some fine old woodwork. The chancel roof is 14th century, the roofs of the nave and aisle are 15th century,and the screen (with figures of Christ,the Madonna, and ten saints painted on its panels) is a treasure 400 years old.

Despite it being locked both times I visited some of the interior has been shot (not by me) and can be found on Flickr here.

Kelvedon

After almost two months of rain enforced delay I grasped a window of opportunity last Tuesday to visit St Mary the Virgin which, to be honest, left me somewhat indifferent. An 1877 restoration rendered it somewhat sterile and although it retains some items of interest (some good gargoyles and roof angels for example) this, to me, is pretty run of the mill.

Pevsner: ST MARY THE VIRGIN. The NW angle of the nave is evidently Norman. Nothing else of the period is visible. Nave and aisles belong to the C13, see especially the arcades. They have circular piers, except for one N pier with a four-shaft-four-hollow section. The capitals are partly moulded, partly with some stiff-leaf and crocket decoration. The arches are of many mouldings. C14 W tower with diagonal buttresses, battlements and a recessed spire. Also embattled the two aisles. The C14 chancel has a Perp E window put in by Sir Arthur Blomfield in 1876. The N vestry is an early C16 brick addition with a stepped gable and a four-light window with intersected tracery applied to a depressed four-centred head. Between chancel and vestry a C14 window and a C14 doorway made out of the head of a two-light window. - STAINED GLASS. E window by Burlison & Gryll; s chapel, second s window from E by Clayton & Bell 1859; w window by Laver & Westlake 1896; s chapel E window by Powell (belated pre-Raphaelite; designed by L. Davis). - SCULPTURE. Small wooden panel in the Vestry, probably Flemish, early CI7. - PLATE. Cup of 1562; Paten also Early Elizabethan. - MONUMENTS . To the Abdy family especially Sir Thomas d. 1679 with inscription on a draped stone curtain (by W. Stanton?), and Sir Anthony d. 1704 (by Edward Stanton).

KELVEDON. For about a mile it runs along the Roman road to Colchester from London, and under the road at the foot of Feering Hill the Blackwater flows through a five-arched bridge. We may wonder how many villages in England there are with sixty national monuments in them, for sixty old houses in Kelvedon are scheduled for preservation by the nation.

In this historic little place was born last century a boy who grew up to make his name known wherever men listen to sermons or read them, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, for whom no church or chapel in the world was too big to hold his congregations.

The 600-year-old tower of the church is joined on to Norman walls with Roman bricks in them; the tower has grotesques at the corners and we noticed a very comical face grimacing on the walls. Indoors the capitals on two nave columns are very beautiful with stiff leaves carved 700 years ago, among the best of that time in Essex. The roof, well lit up by clerestory windows, is magnificent 15th century work and has supporting it richly carved figures playing hautboys and holding shields, crowns, and books. The church has what is called a weeping chancel, built a little aslant, it is said, in keeping with the legend that Our Lord bowed his head on the Cross. In the vestry is a quaintly carved panel of Esther on her knees before Ahasuerus; it is 16th century, and was brought from one of Kelvedon’s old houses. The best window has the  Annunciation by Louis Davis, recalling Rossetti’s masterpiece in the National Gallery.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon of Kelvedon, son of a minister, preached his first sermon at 16; at 18 he was a Baptist pastor; at 20 he was offered a pulpit in London; and a few months later all London was talking of him.

No chapel could hold the throng which crowded to listen to his sermons; he filled the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, and in the end they built him his own great Tabernacle. It cost £3l,000, and every penny had been subscribed when he had been preaching there a month. Three times a week he preached, and nearly 7000 people pressed in every time to hear him. He spoke at the Crystal Palace at the time of the Indian Mutiny and 24,000 came to listen. But this was nothing to the size of his unseen congregation. He had the biggest unseen congregations before the days of wireless. Once a week a sermon of his was printed, till the sermons ran into thousands and their copies into a hundred millions, read all over the world.

For half a century a shop in Paternoster Buildings existed on the sale of these sermons at a penny each. They were reproduced in newspapers; they were translated into many languages. But when his publishers sent a boy late one night through a snowstorm to deliver the proofs of one of them he could spare the time to write asking them "please to blow somebody up for sending the poor little creature here late tonight in all this snow, with a parcel much heavier than he ought to carry," and then he added: "There was no need at all for it. Do kick somebody for me, so that it may not happen again."

Wit and homely speech forced home the fervour of his sermons. He was no actor carrying people on a wave of emotion, but a deep thinker whose printed word would send a man down on his knees. But his creed was that of the old Puritans, as narrow as the gate of heaven seemed to him. Yet Spurgeon’s sermons were not bought only by Nonconformists. High Churchmen and Low, Roman Catholic and Evangelical, read them, sure that no sermons they could preach were as rich in thought as these. The city man and the shop assistant, the coalheaver and the duchess, bought his penny sermons as now they buy their penny papers; and just as the crowd waits outside the cinema today so they would wait outside Spurgeon’s Tabernacle at the end of last century.

On his tomb at Norwood it is said that he "being dead, yet speaketh." For years that was true; and still his sermons are read, and there are many to say that none are finer yet. But his influence has died down like the lull after a great storm, and we are left wondering at the power of this man.

Simon K -

A bright day with a northerly wind might not have been an ideal scenario in which to work my way south to north, but it avoided waiting for connections. So at 0920 I was disembarking at Kelvedon station. Kelvedon & Feering is a joint village, a large one, larger than some towns, but undoubtedly a village in character. The continuous High Street of both is the old A12, which bypassed it as a dual carriageway to the east in the 1960s, but it still seemed pretty busy to me. The two parts are historically separated by the infant River Blackwater, and the old part of Feering is separated from the rest by the Norwich to London railway line. This makes the village sound hellish, but actually it is very pleasant, with some good late Medieval and Georgian domestic buildings.

The two parish churches are at the westerly and easterly extremities of the village, the station about halfway in between. I had already made plans in advance by ringing Kelvedon rectory the day before, where a very nice lady told me that "yes, Kelvedon church is open every day", and she also gave me the contact for Feering, which I had heard was a fortress. So, first to Kelvedon church.

Locked. I'd say I couldn't quite believe it, but I always expect this kind of thing to happen. There was no keyholder notice, so if I hadn't rung the rectory the day before, I would just have assumed that Kelvedon was a fortress too. It isn't: I rang the rectory, but there was no answer. I rang the churchwarden whose number I fortunately still had on the same piece of paper, and he was really apologetic. "The Rector usually opens up on a Tuesday, and he's away on retreat. I'll be there in five minutes." And he was, still apologetic, and he unlocked the church and hurriedly left me to it.

This is a big urban church, handsome in its setting of a mature, sloping churchyard, but indistinguishable from any other church of its type from Cromer to Calcutta once you get inside. Excellent 1898 window by Louis Davis for Powell & Co, outstanding of its kind. Execrable adjacent window by the same workshop in 1938. I'd arranged to meet the Feering churchwarden at 10, but the delay in getting into Kelvedon made time tight, so I was glad it had little to detain me!

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