Chipping Ongar

St Martin was a chance visit - I passed it on my way to Greensted. I found it open  which was nice but I didn't warm to it - it felt over restored and soulless, Pevsner found more of interest than I did.

ST MARTIN of TOURS. Uncommonly complete Norman village church. Nave and chancel, both with characteristic masonry, Roman brick quoins, and small windows. Two plain chancel doorways also survive, and a W window high up in the gable. The E end is altered, but traces, especially inside, prove that there were originally three or four windows and two above them in the gable which was higher than now. The date of the belfry is probably C15. Dormers in the roof 1752 (VCI-I.). The S aisle was added in 1884. Nice W gallery on two Tuscan columns. Chancel roof with arched braces supporting collar-beams and additional arched braces carried to a pendant hanging from the collar-beam. The Royal Commission dates the roof early C17. The nave-roof is simple, with arched braces on head-stops and tracery between the braces and the tie-beams. King-posts in addition. - PULPIT. Panels with diamond-cut frames and thin strapwork, c. 1600. - COMMUNION RAIL. With twisted balusters, c. 1700. - PLATE. Paten of 1705. - MONUMENTS. Nicholas Alexander d. 1714, epitaph with two cherub’s heads at the foot. It might be by Edward Stanton. - Mrs Mitford d. 1776. By Nollekens. Epitaph with the usual obelisk and two cherubs against it and an urn between them; one stands, the other sits and sobs.

CHIPPING ONGAR. It is one of those small Essex towns instinct with the thrill of history. One after another there come to mind the moving scenes of its historic past. To some it will seem that the chief appeal of this long street with gabled houses and overhanging storeys is in a little room the passer-by is invited to look at, the room in the house of a pastor where David Livingstone lived, serving his probation before he set out on his lifework in Africa. The boy at the mill had come down from Blantyre and was training here with the minister, and there may well be those who remember hearing of the nervous young man who had hardly strength to lead his congregation at prayer, who gave out hymn after hymn while he summoned up courage to preach and then fled down the steps and into the street, afraid. Yet in the end he passed the test, and from here set out to carry on his preparation elsewhere for the work which was to win him immortality.

But far, far back we go beyond the fame of David Livingstone, for here is a mound crowned by a ring of living trees where once stood the wooden keep of a Norman castle, and there is little doubt that a castle stood on it before the Conqueror came, for in its walls is a medley of Roman tiles which strongly suggest that they were put here by the Saxons. On such foundations as they found the Romans set up one of their great strongholds. The mound is 230 feet across, encircled by a moat 50 feet wide, with the water still in it. On the town side was a courtyard with a rampart 80 feet wide, and even beyond this men have traced a rampart which embraced the whole of Ongar, a remarkable example of a town enclosure of feudal days.

Here lived one of the famous Norman barons, Richard de Lucy, Chief Justice in the reign of Henry the Second. He took the side of the king against Becket, and Becket excommunicated him. Weary of strife, the judge became a canon in a priory he had founded in Kent, Lesnes Priory at Erith, within whose quiet walls he died. Across the Darent, not far away from the ruins of Lesnes, are the ruins of the castle of another friend of the king excommunicated by Becket, William de Eynsford, who, also weary of strife, gave up this world and lived for the next, leaving his castle deserted, not to be lived in again for eight hundred years.

Richard de Lucy would see the church in the shadow of his high keep much as we see it now. The walls of the nave and the chancel are of the same rubble and Norman bricks as in his day. Through the little Norman windows the worshippers would see the keep against the sky. There are narrow Roman tiles outside these windows, and it is believed that Saxons put them there. There are Roman tiles at the corners of the walls and over a blocked-up Norman doorway; the light of a Norman window falls also on the gallery. A chancel window of a century later, a triple lancet, is one of the very early uses of brick by our English builders.

There is a captivating peephole in the chancel wall which faces this, a hole about 13 inches by 6, opening from a tiny chamber in the thickness of the wall. Outside the wall are hinges and the socket for a bolt, and above is a hole which seems to have held a roof beam. From all this it is supposed that this tiny chamber was the cell and the grave of one of those strange anchorites who shut themselves up from the world, immured in the wall with a little hole through which they could fix their eyes on the altar. The roof the anchorite would see is still above the nave, with a Norman corbel surviving from the earlier roof, and a carving on one of the timbers of a man with toothache. Through this roof in the 15th century they pierced a space for the massive timber belfry, and about 200 years ago they set on the spire the weather-vane in the form of a pennon which still turns in the wind.

The pulpit is 17th century; it would be new when they laid here beneath the chancel Jane Pallavicine, the daughter of one of the less known Oliver Cromwells, the Sir Oliver whose claim to fame rests on his lavish entertainment of James the First. There is a monument by Nollekens to Sarah Mitford; the fashionable sculptor has given her angels on her tomb, one weeping and one placing a wreath. On the wall is one of those pathetic wooden crosses from the battlefields, brought from the grave of Henry Austin Noble, who died for us a month before the Armistice. There is a window to him with St Martin in it.

This is one of the rare places where the chapel appeals to us as well as the church, for the Congregationalists have been established in Ongar since 1690, and the most famous men of Ongar have been two Nonconformists -David Livingstone, who trained here for the ministry, and Isaac Taylor, who was pastor here. Livingstone must have known this chapel, and may have preached in it for his tutor-pastor, Richard Cecil, of whom we read in the story of Stanford Rivers. Isaac Taylor lies behind his church, and with him lie his wife and their daughter Jane, who (at their house at Lavenham, over the border in Suffolk) wrote at least one thing known to every child, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. There is a tablet in the chapel to them, and though a schoolroom now stands over their graves we may lift up a panel in the floor and read their simple stone.

The Taylors of Ongar

IT was said of the Taylors of Ongar that it was impossible to be one of them and not write. They did more than write; they painted, engraved, and invented, and Sir Francis Galton cited them in his famous list as examples of the diffusion of hereditary talent. The line took its rise in a 17th century Worcester metal-worker and engraver, specimens of whose work are in the British Museum.

He was the father of the first Isaac Taylor, who, born in 1730, walked to London and worked as a silversmith until he proved himself an engraver of merit, whereupon he was entrusted with the plates for Goldsmith’s Deserted Village. His son Isaac was educated at Brentford and then worked in his father’s studio. After engraving plates for Shakespeare, the Bible, and Thomson’s Seasons, he entered the ministry at Colchester, and arrived at Chipping Ongar at 51, pastor of the Congregational Church. Here he spent the last 19 years of his life, teaching his children and his flock, and writing biography, travel, and other books for the young, while his wife wrote moral and instructive lessons for children and parents. They had many children, among them the two girls and their brother Isaac.

The third Isaac, born at Lavenham in Suffolk in 1787, an artist with brush and graver, helped his father, illustrated his sister’s books, and wrote books of his own, one on the Natural History of Enthusiasm. But it was the sisters, Ann and Jane, who immortalised the family. They wrote their early poetry in moments stolen from lessons. Not until 1804, when Ann was 24 and Jane 21, did their first volume appear. Bringing them fame and £15, it brought poetry for the first time to the lips of millions of children. In their Poems for Infant Minds were such familiar verses as My Mother and Little Star, with other pieces which have long been part of the nursery heritage of the world. Scores of editions were printed; the book was translated into foreign tongues, and soon children everywhere were repeating the lines of Ann and Jane Taylor. They wrote other books for children, tales, fables, and especially hymns, many of which are sung in all our churches. Jane died here unmarried in 1824; Ann became the wife of the Revd Joseph Gilbert, whom she accompanied to Nottingham, where she lived the last 41 years of her life.

In 1866 an odd thing happened, 60 years after Ann’s poem My .Mother had appeared. A writer in a literary weekly called attention to the last stanza in the poem and asked that it should be altered. These are the lines:

And when I see thee hang thy head,
Twill be my turn to watch thy bed,
And tears of sweet affection shed,
                                   My Mother.

For God who lives above the skies,
Would look with vengeance in His eyes,
If I should ever dare despise
                                    My Mother.

The critic, 60 years after, “in the name of all the children of England,” proposed a change which should remove this threat of vengeance, suggesting that Tennyson should make the alteration. To everybody’s surprise, however, Ann Taylor, then 84 and long forgotten under the name of Ann Gilbert, herself vigorously replied, acknowledging the justice of the criticism, adding that it was “a favour now to have any critics at all,” and drafting new lines ending:

For could my Father in the skies
Look down with pleased or loving eyes
If ever I could dare despise
                                       My Mother?

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Norton Mandeville

Other than its setting there is little or nothing of interest at All Saints; the exterior is pleasant enough, but nothing to write home about, while the interior is stripped bare.

ALL SAINTS. Small C12 fragments re-used in the walls and a small fragment of a spiral-carved Norman column with projecting moulding, considered by the Royal Commission to be part of a Pillar Piscina, tell of an earlier church on the site. The present nave and chancel seem C14. The belfry of the C15 (?) rests on a tiebeam with king-posts inside. - FONT. Square, with attached angle columns, of Barnack stone, late C12. - PULPIT. Plain, C18. - SCREEN with plain one-light, ogee-headed divisions. - BENCH-ENDS. With coarsely carved poppy-heads, C16, probably late. - PLATE. Early C17 Cup; Paten and Almsdish given in 1703.

NORTON MANDEVILLE. Here, facing a spacious modern farm, is one of the smallest churches in Essex, a Norman church made new 600 years ago, built to hold the hundred people of that time and never enlarged. The Norman stones peep out from the flint walls of the 14th century. The children are still christened at the Norman font, a good one with a round shaft carved out of each corner. It has the staples with which it was padlocked against witches. Round about the font are tiles which have preserved their varied pattern under the feet of 25 generations. The nave keeps its original roof with moulded capitals and bases on the kingposts; the end beams support the 15th century bellcot and from their brackets painted carvings of the lion and the unicorn regard each other disdainfully across the nave. The modern screen has eight heads carved for the old screen by a medieval craftsman, and in the nave are six open benches with poppyheads shaped by a Tudor carpenter.

The manor house stands near Norton Heath a mile away, a beautiful timbered and gabled building, with 1613 on its chimney.

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Greensted

St Andrew lays claim to be the oldest extant wooden church in the world and possibly the oldest wooden building in Europe. It has recently been tree ring dated to sometime between 998 and 1063; the oak walls of the nave are classified as remnants of a palisade church or a kind of early stave church.

Personally I found the interior dark and gloomy and rather dull but the exterior is fascinating as is the fact of its age.

ST ANDREW. The church is famous all over England as the only survival - and what an unlikely survival - of a log-church. Moreover, it can with some probability be dated c. 1013, the year of the passing through of St Edmund’s body. The nave is built of oak logs split vertically in halves and set vertically in an oak sill. The present sill and the brick plinth belong to the restoration of 1848 (Thomas Henry Wyatt) which is also responsible for the nave roof. But the Tudor dormers of timber are original save for two and worth some study. The chancel of brick is early C16 (one S window and the S doorway), its E end C18. The W tower is also entirely of timber, in the Essex tradition. Its date is uncertain. It has the usual internal construction, is externally weatherboarded and painted white and carries a shingled broach spire. - PAINTING. Small arched panel of St Edmund, c. 1500. - STAINED GLASS. Head of a man; c. 1500 (W window).

GREENSTED. It is a shrine of universal pilgrimage, unique in its sylvan setting and unique in one of its possessions, a wooden church with Saxon timbers built into its walls. It is the Saxon church in which St Edmund’s body rested on its last journey.

Even if its timbers were not so captivating for their great age (1013), the picture of this primitive church would draw the pilgrim to it. Its 19th century dormers, its neat porch with a red-tiled roof harmonising with the low roof of the nave, the little shingled spire on the wooden tower, and the red brick of the chancel wall, draw us into this rugged churchyard where roses bloom amid cypress trees. Giant survivors of the forest make a perfect background for a church whose walls stand much as they were when the monks of Bury St Edmunds, having, in their fear of the Danes, carried the body of their saint for safety to the walled city of London, brought it back and rested it in this forest sanctuary on its way.

Here are the oldest wooden walls of Old England; come close to them and run your fingers along the shaped timbers and feel the marks of the adze made by the Saxon carpenter. The trees they felled to build this church were growing when the Romans came; they felled a score of oaks and split each trunk in three, using the outer beams as a palisade and the central planks for the roof and the sills. It is interesting to see how these Saxon carpenters made this place. Roughly adzing off the upper ends of the uprights into a thin edge, they inserted them into a groove in a beam running along each side of the nave. They fixed their bases on a wooden sill, but a century ago they had so rotted that a dwarf wall was placed below them, their height being reduced by about a foot. There are 21 logs on the north wall with three extra ones where a door once stood, and 16 logs on the south, through which wall we enter. The Saxon nave is 29 feet long and 17 feet wide. The original roof was thatched and was lighted from a window in the timbers of the west wall and from others in the chancel.

The church was much refashioned in the 16th century when the chancel, the beautiful priest’s doorway, and the charming tower and belfry were added. A small painted panel of the martyrdom of St Edmund shows him wearing a crown but clothed in a loin cloth and bound to a tree pierced with arrows shot by soldiers, one of whom wears Roman armour. The panel is probably all that remains of a 15th century screen*, and keeping company with it is another medieval portrait of the saint in a roundel of the west window; it shows his crowned head.

One possession the church has more curiously linked with the martyrdom of St Edmund, the wooden covers of a Bible and a prayer book, made from the timbers of what is believed to be the actual tree under which Edmund was martyred. The tree was growing at Home in Suffolk and had become a giant nearly 20 feet round when it fell 100 years ago. Tradition had long fixed on this as Edmund’s tree and it is remarkable that when the tree fell a Danish arrowhead was found in the trunk. The arrow is still in existence. The fine lectern on which this interesting Bible rests was carved in our own time by a local craftsman, from an oak growing at Greensted. It is a skilful piece of craftsmanship, likely to go down the ages with the 18th century pulpit, the medieval piscina, and the odd stoup cut 700 years ago in one of the great timbers of the wall.

* This was stolen in January of this year.

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Stanford Rivers

The rather unprepossessing rendered exterior of St Margaret conceals what is an interesting and lovely interior. Chief points of interest are the 1952 FW Skeat east window, a stained glass window in the south nave window, some Norman windows and a fine collection of brass.

ST MARGARET. C12 nave with original W window high up, two N and two S windows. The W window is blocked by an intriguing slab with a primitive figure carving. The chancel is Dec, see the windows (but the E window is C19). Good N porch of timber; late C15, now blocked. Belfry on four posts as usual and with leaded broach spire. Nave roof with tie-beams on braces and king-posts. - FONT. Of the usual Purbeck type of  c. 1200, but of Barnack stone. Octagonal with two shallow pointed arches to each side. - SCREEN. Bits of the tracery have been re-used in the W gallery. - BENCHES. Eighteen oak benches; plain ends with two buttresses each. - COMMUNION RAIL. With turned balusters, mid C17. - PLATE. Set of c. 1780 in silver on copper. - BRASSES. Hidden below the altar (see Royal Commission).

STANFORD RIVERS. A narrow avenue of lofty limes leads us to the door of a church four times as long as it is wide, with Norman windows in the nave and a chancel made new in the 14th century. By one of the nave windows is an old sundial. The bell-turret added 100 years after has a graceful leaded spire. The work of an artist of 600 years ago remains in faint outline on the splay of a window, two figures appearing in colour under gabled canopies. Other medieval craftsmanship is in a gallery with nine traceried heads from the old chancel screen, and about 20 of the old carved pews are still in the nave. Portraits of some of the old inhabitants who sat in these pews are here in brass. Robert Borrow is with his wife, who wears a headdress of about 1500; the infant Thomas Greville is here; and framed in an arch are Anne Napper and her six sons. All these lads would thrill at the tales brought to the village about Francis Drake, who was knighted by Elizabeth three years before this monument was set on the wall.

There is another little tale we remember here, of David Livingstone. While qualifying for his mission to Africa he was sent down to Essex to study for three months; it was a probationary period, and upon the report of his tutor, the Revd Richard Cecil of Chipping Ongar, depended his acceptance or refusal by the London Missionary Society. Part of his task was to prepare sermons and submit them in writing to Cecil, who would read and correct them if necessary, where-upon the student had to learn the sermon by heart and preach it to one of the village congregations round about. The minister of the chapel here being taken suddenly ill, the young Scotsman was called upon to take the evening service, and all went well until the sermon, when Livingstone slowly read out his text - and paused. He said afterwards that it was as if midnight darkness had descended upon him. The sermon, so perfectly memorised until a moment before, had fled, and his mind was filled with blank terror. “Friends,” he haltingly said, “I have forgotten what I had to say,” and abruptly he left the pulpit, and fled.

Yet the real man showed itself, even here. He had to visit a relative on the far side of London, and, too poor to ride, he set out at three o’clock on a bitter November morning to walk 27 miles. It was so dark that he fell into a deep ditch, but he reached London, discharged his business, and set out on the return journey. A few miles out he found a lady lying unconscious by a trap from which she had been thrown, carried her to a house, made sure that she was not badly hurt, and continued on his way, only to lose himself completely. He was about to lie down in a ditch for the night when he stumbled on a signpost and plodded on, reaching home at midnight after 21 hours of walking, footsore, speechless with fatigue, but triumphant, as he was to be so often in the years to come.

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Navestock

At first I thought St Thomas the Apostle was locked but applying more force to the latch I found it was open and was informed by the two flower arrangers I found inside that it is always open. I loved this curious church with its semi octagonal tower base and the arcade which appears to be stone but is in fact timber covered with lath & plaster. It is a light and airy building full of interest.

ST THOMAS THE APOSTLE. At the time of writing a neglected, almost derelict-looking church. Nave N wall with plain Norman doorway. S aisle, S chancel chapel and S arcade E.E Circular piers and double-chamfered arches. The pier at the E end of the arcade and the W end of the S chancel chapel is of oak and polygonal, almost like fluted. What date can this possibly be? One blocked lancet in the S chapel, one long lancet in the S aisle. Early C14 chancel with Dec windows - the E window of three-lights with reticulated tracery. In the nave N wall at its E end a wide recess, E.E., with a shaft on the l. carrying a stiff-leaf capital. Probably in the C15 a s porch was added and also - a more ambitious enterprise - a timber tower. This stands to the W not of the nave but the aisle. It is oblong and has N and S aisles and in addition a W aisle connected with the others by triangular pieces - a rare arrangement. The tower is carried on four heavy posts, each with an octagonal shaft attached diagonally towards the centre. These shafts carry rib-like arched braces meeting in the middle in a foliage boss. - DOORS. Three with ornamental hinges; one (N doorway) is C12, the other two C13. - ORGAN. Early C18, bought from Lord Southwood’s house at Highgate, London. - PLATE. Cup and Paten of 1624; two Flagons, inscribed 1626 and 1630. - MONUMENTS. Mainly to the Waldegrave family, and singularly modest. Edward W. d. 1809, by Bacon jun, with a Weeping female allegorical figure bent over military objects, and a triumphant cherub higher up. - Seventh Earl Waldegrave d. 1846, with bust by Behnes. Also John Greene d. 1653, with frontal demi-figure. - Anne Snelling d. 1625, tiny reclining marble figure with tinier baby in her arms.

NAVESTOCK. A colossal barn, tall limes, and a huge chestnut keep company with its church, which has a shingled spire rising from an astonishing wooden belfry. The surprise of it is inside, where 15th century beams and ancient ladders seem to be in great confusion, With masses of woodwork all about us. Looking closer, we see that the four chief uprights are moulded at the capitals, and that four great beams curve up to meet in a boss of carved foliage. The belfry woodwork is oak splendid and unashamed, but the wood in the church is so covered with whitewash that we might think it stone. We see it in the wooden arch of the 14th century chancel, and in another arch across the 13th century chapel, both arches rising from an oak pillar which ends the line of round stone piers built about 1250, when the church was doubled in width.

The oldest masonry is in the north wall of the nave, which has a plain doorway of the 11th century. Four doors in the church are of remarkable age, and have well preserved their ironwork though some of the wood has been renewed. One is in the ancient Norman doorway; others of the 13th century are in aisle and chapel; and double doors of Chaucer’s day lead from the aisle into the bell tower. The porch is 15th century, and in a corner by the modern font are coffin lids of two priests about 600 years ago, one with a raised cross.

On the 17th century gravestone of little Jane Marchant, who was only 15, are two delightful lines:

So fair a blossom, so exquisitely good,
That I want words to make it understood.

In the chancel are two striking 17th century monuments, much in contrast. One has a simple alabaster figure of Ann Snelling holding her baby; the other is the bust of John Greene, a judge who seems proud of his family, for he is shown with a display of heraldry, many of the shields having the stag’s head seen again on a helmet above.

The great folk at Navestock have been the Waldegraves, many of whom sleep here. Their old house has gone but its park with a lovely lake is left, and there are monuments to remind us of them. There is a bust of the seventh earl who died in 1846; a relief of the eighth earl’s eldest son who fell at Alma; and another relief, carved by John Bacon, to the fourth earl’s son, who distinguished himself in Sir John Moore’s campaign and was shipwrecked when nearly home. The carving shows a boy unfurling a flag, his mother weeping below.

Two older monuments take us into circles more distinguished still. One is a Latin inscription to a daughter of James the Second, Henrietta, wife of that Lord Waldegrave who, as one of the king’s counsellors, had to fly with him at the Revolution. The other is an enormous wall tablet telling of the next two generations of Waldegraves, of Henrietta’s son James, the first earl, who was an able ambassador; and of her grandson the second earl, who moved for a few brief moments in the centre of the English stage. He was James Waldegrave, too, a friend of George the Second and tutor to the Prince of Wales. He married a niece of Walpole who was one of the beauties of her day and was seven times painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Waldegrave is chiefly remembered, however, as the man who became Prime Minister for five days (June 8-12, 1757). It happened in the early summer of 1757, and he had no wish to fill the office, but allowed himself to be nominated to please the king. His ministry never came into being, however, and nobody can have been more pleased than he when in place of it was born the famous ministry of Newcastle and Pitt, during the life of which England became supreme at sea, in India, and in North America.

Simon K -

Open. This is another famous church, attractive because of its aisled tower as at Blackmore and Mundon, and a very big church too, sprawling in a wide churchyard with just a farmhouse for company. You have to go down a track to get to it. Inside is a delight, full of light. The main feature is probably the extensive range of memorials, but a great curiosity is that the arcade is carried on rustic wooden cruck beams above the capitals of elegant fluted 13th century pillars. I liked this best of all today.

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Stapleford Abbotts

Here at St Mary the trip made a turn for the better when I found it open but only because a nice couple were arranging flowers. Whilst this is not a particularly interesting church either externally or internally, the husband of the duo did unlock the vestry to show me the C14th glass portraying Edward the Confessor. Afterwards I dallied in the churchyard admiring the view and a partridge shoot which was ongoing in the next door field.

ST MARY. Yellow brick W tower of 1815 and hideous church of 1862, by T. Jekyll of Norwich. The walls faced with a crazy-paving pattern. The windows with geometrical tracery. Nice small N chapel of brick, built in 1638. The windows, a remarkable fact, are round-arched and no longer Perp. - PULPIT. Nice late C16 piece with blank arches in the panels. - HELM in the N chapel, late C16. - STAINED GLASS. Very fine, small early C14 figure of Edward the Confessor (N vestry). - PLATE. Cup, Paten, larger Paten and Flagon, all of 1687; Almsdish of 1692. - MONUMENT. Sir John Abdy d. 1758. Standing wall monument with large putto standing by an oval medallion with frontal, rather vacant, portrait. Broken pediment on brackets at the top.

STAPLEFORD ABBOTS. Close to where the River Roding flows under the Ongar road is the slope of this village, where a lane leads us to a 19th century church with a brick tower and a 17th century chapel. There is elaborate 17th century carving on two chairs and a beautiful pulpit, and the 17 men and one boy who fell in the Great War are remembered by a marble panel of a vigorous St George killing a green dragon, and a window with a soldier trumpeter. But we must go into the vestry to see the finest window, a perfect example of 14th century glass showing Edward the Confessor with his sceptre and ring, his features and his divided beard exquisitely outlined in brown. In the chapel is some 17th century heraldic glass; a 16th century helmet painted with a cap of maintenance, the old badge of nobility;  and a cherub holding a stone portrait in relief of Thomas Abdy, an 18th century lawyer. The Abdys were the great family here from 1650. A path across the fields and a stately avenue from the road leads to their old home of Albyns.

A brick house designed by Inigo Jones, it has in it part of the home built for Sir Thomas Edmondes, whose twelve volumes of diplomatic correspondence are an important source of Elizabethan history. The house is known for a wonderful staircase, carved with the Arts and the Virtues; for its panelling; and for its plaster ceilings. The transomed windows look out on to a square courtyard, and there is a gallery running 100 feet from bay to bay.

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Lambourne

Although the exterior of St Mary & All Saints is fascinating - particularly the Norman north door - it was the interior I particularly wanted to see. Sadly the church was locked with no keyholder listed so this was not to be.

ST MARY AND ALL SAINTS. A church of quite exceptional charm and historical range. It consists of C12 nave and chancel and C15 belfry, but the exterior and interior were re-modelled boldly, naively and very successfully in the Early Georgian age. Norman windows on both sides, a plain Norman S doorway and a more elaborate N doorway, with one order of columns, an arch decorated by zigzag and a fragmentary tympanum diapered with carved stars. The other windows are C18, pointed in the nave, arched in the chancel. The W doorway with a canopy on carved brackets is dated 1726, the W gallery inside 1704 (the gift of an ironmonger of London). This hides much of the substructure of the belfry which outside is crowned by a leaded broach spire. But more unusual and ingenious is the way in which the C15 roof construction was hidden. The tiebeams are plastered and have Greek-key friezes along their undersides, and one king-post with its four-way struts is clothed in rich acanthus leaves. The chancel arch is low and broad, of segmental form and rests on thick coupled brackets. - FONT. C18, with baluster stem. - REREDOS with Corinthian pilasters and a Gothick ogee arch round the E window. — CHANCEL STALLS with fine openwork foliage carving. - PULPIT. Jacobean. - WALL PAINTING. Upper half of a large figure of St Christopher; C14, of high quality. - STAINED GLASS. Fine small panels of C17 Swiss or German glass. - MONUMENTS. Brass to Robert Barfott d. 1546 and wife, with children below; 18 in. figures; chancel floor. - Many C18 and C19 monuments to the Lockwood family, mostly unsigned, the most ambitious that of John Lockwood, erected in 1778. Largish figure of Hope with an anchor and an urn. By Joseph Wilton.

LAMBOURNE. It is at the edge of the ancient forest of Hainault, and from its high ground above the River Roding it looks across to Epping Forest running along the horizon. On this high ground stands the church, with two Norman doorways through which we pass no more. It is the glass of the east window that strikes us as we come in, a modern scene of Bethlehem in memory of Lord Lambourne. In another chancel window are small gems in quieter tones, a group of five panels brought from Basle, painted about 300 years ago. They represent the choice between Good and Evil, the Adoration of the Wise Men, the Incredulity of Thomas, Christ and Peter on the sea, and the Shepherds. A nave window is in memory of a man who loved to ride about these uplands, and lived to ride in that last Wild charge from which he never returned, against the Russian guns at Balaclava. He was George Lockwood, aide-de-camp to Lord Cardigan.

Engraved in brass are the portraits of a Tudor mercer with his wife and their family of nine sons and ten daughters; and there is a wall monument to Thomas Winniffe, who became Dean of St Paul’s and Bishop of Lincoln, and retired here during the Commonwealth. The pulpit is of his day, and some of the old stalls. There is a gallery of 1704.

Lambourne Hall was built in Queen Elizabeth’s day on the site where lived a warrior bishop who fought in Italy for the Pope and crushed the peasant rising against the taxes of Richard the Second. He was Henry le Despenser, of whom perhaps the best that can be said is that he was loyal to Richard after his fall.

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Havering atte Bower

The setting for St John the Evangelist is stunning; it sits on the green with an unusual semi detached tower but was, sadly, locked. Entirely Victorian but for all that this is pleasing building.

ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST. By Basil Champneys, 1875-8, that is an early work of his. Flint, with Dec windows and an arcade in the Essex tradition. A little freer only the S tower with an open E-W passage through, a higher stair turret, and openwork battlements. - FONT. C12, of Purbeck marble, octagonal, with two shallow blank arches on each side.

HAVERING-ATTE-BOWER. Kings and queens have walked here, and wherever we turn we come upon their memory. Here came Edward the Confessor seeking solitude, praying even that the nightingales might be silent. Here Edward the Third invested little Richard as his successor, and from here Richard as king set out for Pleshey with a band of men to trap his uncle Gloucester. Here, too, lived and died Henry the Fourth’s queen, Joan of Navarre, who sleeps at Canterbury.

The portrait of Joan on her tomb at Canterbury shows her as a woman of outstanding beauty, yet she was regarded as a witch, having been accused by her confessor of plotting the death of her stepson Henry the Fifth. Duchess of Brittany when her husband died, she became Regent for theeldest of her eight children. In 1403 she married Henry the Fourth, was crowned at Westminster, and was voted a dowry of 10,000 marks a year. When the king died Henry the Fifth seems to have continued to love his stepmother, though at Agincourt her son Arthur fought against him and was brought captive to her door. Four years later, however, came this horrible accusation and the Council deprived the Dowager Queen of all she possessed, taking her from Havering-atte-Bower to the security of Leeds Castle in Kent and Pevensey in Sussex. The charge appears now to have been a gross piece of injustice and corruption. Henry the Fifth on his deathbed wrote a letter setting his conscience free from blame for having taken the queen’s dowry, and so Joan was set free and what remained of her dowry was returned to her. For the remaining 15 years of her life she was held in high honour by Henry the Sixth.

Historians have always wondered why, in those days when witchcraft was a dread reality, the queen was never brought to trial. An examination of her household accounts (preserved at the Record Office and at John Rylands Library) reveals that Joan was exceedingly well furnished with food, luxuries, and servants during her three years of restraint; and it is now believed that the charge of witchcraft was trumped up so that the Exchequer, almost emptied by the wars in France, should receive the benefit of her dowry, which was a very substantial sum in those days.

The oldest site identifiable on which these royal homes stood is at Havering Park, where an 18th century house with a tower hides in a splendid group of trees. It was the place for the queens when their kings were hunting in Hainault Forest, and the last king to come was Charles Stuart, who was here to meet his wife’s mother, the notorious Marie de Medici. She hoped to settle in England, and Parliament could only be rid of her by a gift of ten thousand pounds.

It is possible still to make out the terraced walks of the royal gardens, and there stands in Pyrgo Park an oak 20 feet round which, if its story were true, would be one of the most famous trees in England, for the story is that under this tree Queen Elizabeth sat when they brought news that the Great Armada had gone down. We cannot vouch for it.

The big village green is on high ground from which the hills of Kent are sometimes seen. Beside the oldest of its elms are two relics of village life long ago, the stocks and whipping-post of about 1700. The church by the green is a handsome 19th century building, with heads of lions in the porch roof under the tower. The chancel is enriched with panelling, the font is Norman, and there is a memorial showing a sorrowing woman and a scene in a harvest field. The oldest gravestone is that of Thomas Cheek, who was Lieutenant of the Tower and died in 1688, the year of the Revolution which doomed the Stuart dynasty for ever.

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Chigwell Row

I set out expecting to find most of the churches on this venture into south Essex locked  but was pleasantly surprised to find the majority open. All Saints, however, was not but I was not unduly concerned as it is a Victorian creation and undoubtedly the interior would be as drab as the exterior - not the worst I've seen but nor the best.

ALL SAINTS. 1867 by Seddon ‘excellent of its sort’ (GR). Yellow stone with white stone dressings. NW tower, low three-bay entrance porch with wheel window above. The style of the church is C13. Inside arcades with thickly carved stiff-leaf capitals. The chancel was rebuilt in 1918-19.

CHIGWELL ROW. From its highest point we look out over the Thames valley to the Kent hills, and below us is the famous Hainault Forest where kings and abbots hunted and the LCC now reigns over 1100 acres of rolling fields and woodland. So close it is to London, yet all around is wild and natural, the nightingale sings in the thicket, and many big trees increase their girth undisturbed, though the giant of them all, the Monarch Fairlop Oak, fell a century ago, when it was 45 feet round the trunk and had 17 branches each as big as an ordinary oak.

Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton, used to come from his home near by to pay a formal call on the oak every first Friday in July, a practice started by his namesake Daniel, a Wapping pumpmaker who came here to collect rent. The pumpmaker gave his friends an annual feast of bean and bacon under this tent of leaves 300 feet round, and when he died in 1767 his coffin was fashioned from a fallen branch.

An avenue of limes and chestnuts leads to a house close to the 19th century church with a tower of our own century, and it seems fitting that this church among the trees should be graced with much fine woodwork. The east window pictures in lovely colours the opening of the worship of the Lamb. On the wall an arch-angel with grey-blue wings of enamel honours the names of the fallen.

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Highwood

St Paul was missed by both Mee & Pevsner which in many ways is fair enough - it's a template Victorian build (for example Cornish Hall End, Essex) and both are hideous and I suspect are from the same architect.

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Fryerning

St Mary the Virgin purports to be open but was locked when I visited. I met another visitor who'd been before and found it locked; also the high tech locks seem to indicate this is a shutdown church.

ST MARY. Small, with early C16 brick tower, with blue brick diapering, stepped battlements on a pointed-arched corbel frieze and brick pinnacles. Nave of coursed pudding-stone and Roman bricks, Early Norman, with four original windows and plain N and S doorways. - FONT. With big square bowl decorated with large scrolls, leaves etc; c. 1200. - STAINED GLASS. E window by Willement, in the Gothic style, but not the Pugin variety. - PLATE. Cup and Cover of 1700; Flagon and Alms dish of 1716. - BRASS in the vestry. Palimpsest. Woman of c. 1460 on one side, Mary Gedge, Elizabethan period, on the other.

FRYERNING. A little apart from the Roman road between London and Chelmsford, it has a sight not soon forgotten, a magnificent red tower standing out above a churchyard rich in pines and yews. It is a noble piece of 15th century brickwork, with handsome pinnacles, shapely windows and buttresses, stepped battlements, and tiny corbelled arches, a perfect tower of its age. There are red tiles on the church roofs, Roman tiles in the walls of the Norman nave and chancel, and wide-splayed Norman windows, some reshaped by a later age. The attractive little priest’s doorway is 15th century, but the people’s doorways are Norman, and one has a consecration cross. A striking Norman font is richly patterned with many designs. In the vestry is one of the best palimpsest brasses we have seen, mounted to show both sides. Its original engraving was of a 15th century lady in a horned headdress; but a little of the headdress is cut away to accommodate the plump face of Mary Berners, on the other side; she is wearing a handsome Tudor robe. There is a tablet to Captain Gordon Elton who died in the Great War after winning the DSO. It has these noble lines written 2500 years ago by the Greek poet Simonides:

Yet being dead they die not; in the grave
Though they be lying
These be the souls to whom high~valour gave
Glory undying.

By the church is Fryerning Hall, a house with timbers almost as old as the church tower.

Buttsbury

Heading off from Ingatestone to Stock I ran out of road, literally - the road to Stock was shut while the Man dug it up and installed something; so I backtracked to Buttsbury.

St Mary is not far from Ingatestone (I'd guess 2 miles maybe 3), is utterly isolated and yet is open - go figure.

A beautiful location is matched by a sublime church.

ST MARY. Small and alone. Short nave of two bays with two aisles, that is wider than it is long. Date CI4. Chancel of the C18 with C19 E window. Small W tower of timber, weather-boarded. The nave arcades are typical Late Perp, composite with the centre parts to the nave carried on into the arches without capitals and the side parts concave-sided semi-octagonal. Two original traceried windows were found during a restoration in 1927. - DOORS. The N and S doors are both old, that on the N more interesting. Some of the metalwork is C13, some later. - PLATE. Cup of 1563 and Paten of 1567, both with bands of ornament.

BUTTSBURY. Its small church stands lonely among elms and limes; by the path is a gravestone carved with a cherub fading away after 200 years. In a table tomb in the churchyard lies Thomas Tyrell of Charles Stuart’s day. Two doors and two windows are the fine possessions here. Both doors have ornamental ironwork, one with hinges of the 13th century and tendril-like bands of great beauty forged in the 14th. The windows, long embedded in plaster, now admit the morning sunlight down each aisle. Their tracery has the graceful curves in which our 14th century architects delighted. In two later windows are fragments of medieval glass, and a bell of the 15th century rings from a last century tower. A local craftsman of great skill has given the fine candlesticks and oak panelling.

Simon K -

Open. An utter delight, a tiny little church set in a peaceful churchyard. There is no tower, and the cross is hard to spot on an OS map. I bet not many people find it except by accident. The interior feels like a CCT church, clean and uncluttered, although it is not redundant. I suspect it is a retired vicar's hobby church. If you stand on the chancel steps looking back, you get a glorious view through the clear glass of the wide west window of rolling barley fields. Wonderful.

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Ingatestone

SS Edmund & Mary was the big disappointment of the day. Situated in the middle of Ingatestone, which was extraordinarily busy, the church was firmly locked - sometimes I think these locked churches are asking to be vandalised. I have no idea what sort of town Ingatestone is but to me it felt like a nice place and I'm bewildered as to why the church was locked - this, as the following shows, seems to be a shame.

ST EDMUND AND ST MARY. A truly magnificent W tower of red brick with black diapers. Tall, with angle buttresses, a three-light brick W window with Perp panel tracery, and two-light windows in two tiers above it. Stepped battlements on a corbel frieze. Behind the tower the small and shortish N wall of the nave, obviously Norman, with walls of puddingstone and Roman brick. The projecting N chancel chapel is C17 brick. S aisle and S chancel chapel C15 to early C16. The S chapel is of brick and was built by the Petre family. Three-light E window with a transome and two- and three-light S windows. Inside, the impression is somewhat disappointing after the glory of the tower. Three-bay S arcade with short piers of the well known Perp four-shaft-four-hollow section, and double-chamfered arches. Three-bay brick arcade to the Petre Chapel, with octagonal piers and triple-chamfered arches. Nave roof with tie-beams, octagonal king-posts with capitals and four-way struts. - FONT. Perp, octagonal with quatrefoil panels bordered by friezes of small quatrefoil panels. - HOUR GLASS of iron, early C18, fixed to the pulpit. - PLATE. Cup of 1675; Paten and two Flagons of 1725; two Cups and covers of 1728. - Three HELMS of c. 1570. - MONUMENTS. Between chancel and S chancel the alabaster tomb-chest of Sir William Petre, Secretary of State to Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary, and Privy Councillor, d. 1572, and wife, with recumbent effigies on rolled-up mats. Very fine quality. The tomb-chest with shell-headed panels separated by columns. - In the chapel itself Robert Petre d. 1593, monument with the usual kneeling figure; between columns of touch. - Also John Troughton d. 1621, with an outstandingly good portrait bust in an oval niche. Relief, in an informal demi-profile. - In the N chapel John, Lord Petre d. 1613 and wife. Standing wall monument of triptych composition with two kneeling figures in the wings, and two kneeling figures on a higher step in the centre. These are under a coffered arch. The parts are separated by black columns. The whole is straight-topped with obelisks and achievements. On the base in relief nice figures of kneeling children.

 

INGATESTONE. A landmark for 200 years, its windmill is still at work crushing oats and beans with stones turned by wooden cog-wheels, the wooden cap swinging round to the wind on a massive brick tower. The red-roofed houses of the old town crowd on the narrow road, and behind them looms another landmark, the 15th century church tower of black and red bricks and white-capped pinnacles, which dwarfs the little nave and the three gabled roofs. There are Roman bricks set in the walls by Norman builders.

Under the arch between the chancel and the chapel he built, Sir William Petre lies on his tomb with his wife, a stately alabaster figure in armour, looking up at the coat-of-arms suspended above him. Delicate ironwork rails off this ornate pillared tomb, a fine example of Elizabethan craftsmanship.

Sir William lived through 67 years of the 16th century, serving Henry the Eighth and his three children on the throne. He grew rich as one of the destroyers of the monasteries, and it is said that his reward was as much as 36,000 acres. Yet he is remembered as a man of great moderation, and one of the stories told of him is that of a French oflicial at Boulogne in 1550 who said, “Ah! we could have gained the last 200,000 crowns without hostages had it not been for that man who said nothing.”

Sir William’s youngest brother Robert appears as a kneeling figure on a wall in the chapel, and a portrait in relief shows Captain John Troughton wearing a sash across his richly ornamented armour.

A brass tablet tells us of a distinguished soldier of three centuries later, Algernon Wood, who went through the Boer War and the first Gallipoli campaign, and was shot dead in a Gallipoli trench within a fortnight of being awarded the DSO.

The noblest of all the monuments here is one raised by the second Lord Petre to his wife and parents; it is a masterpiece in black and white, almost filling the west wall of a chapel built for it. Three generations are here, the grandparents (the first Lord Petre and his wife) kneeling opposite each other in the central bay, both in rich fur-lined cloaks, the grandchildren carved in relief along the base, eight boys and four prim girls in full skirts and fashionable Stuart hats, and their father, a very dignified figure in one of the side bays, looking towards the wife whose death started the building of this superb monument.

Their old home, Ingatestone Hall, with its many delightful stepped gables, was altered in the 18th century but has still a pleasant look of Elizabethan days about it, and is now a Roman Catholic retreat.

Simon K -

Ingatestone is a fine little town set like so many Essex towns along a long high street with plenty of good 18th and 19th century buildings. The church is a magnificent red brick structure with a mighty tower. The chancel opens out into aisles on both sides giving the church an unusual shape. Obviously a busy church with lots going on.

I came here on the day of the Historic Churches Bike Ride 2013. I was the first cyclist of the day, and had to wait in the heavy drizzle for them to open up and let me in. The weather made photography of the exterior very difficult, but the inside of the church was full of a warm light.This was the church of the Petre family, and their memorials are considered among the best of their kind in England. They are certainly magnificent, but the church is so very restored it is hard to think of them as anything more than interesting. The people here were lovely. They had no idea how to set up the paperwork for the bike ride, so I had to help them out. And then on to the outskirts of the town to Fryerning.

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Mountnessing

With St Giles I was back on the downward spiral of locked churches which was a shame as architecturally this is a most peculiar building and I'd have liked to get a sense of it from the inside.

ST GILES. The church makes a handsome picture with the neat Georgian MOUNTNESSING HALL, a seven-bay brick building, with older parts at the back. The main interest of the church is its belfry standing as an independent timber structure in the W bay of the nave. It has six posts, cross-beams supported by impressively tall arched braces and trellis-strutting higher up. The E pair of braces rest on polygonal responds with concave sides. Big buttressing struts in the aisles of the church. The church itself is C13 except for the S aisle which is C19, the chancel which is C18 (of brick) and the brick W front with a date-plate of 1653 and heavy S-cramps for the securing of the belfry timbers. The N and S arcades have circular piers and double-chamfered arches. The capitals are moulded except for one and one respond on the N side which are enriched by stiff-leaf. Lancet windows in the N wall. - REREDOS. Probably c. 1730. Wood, with paintings of Moses and Aaron to the l. and r. - COMMUNION RAIL. Of the same time, with fine twisted balusters. - CHEST. Of dug-out type; perhaps C13. - PLATE. Cup of 1564 with band of ornament; Paten on foot of 1704.

MOUNTNESSING. Its houses run along the Roman road to Chelmsford, but the timber spire of its church is a mile away over the fields. The church has been refashioned from the one the Normans built, and the Roman tiles and Roman masonry they used are visible in the walls. We found the church in a garden of roses; it stands on a knoll above a 17th century hall and is renowned for the wonderful timbering set up in its nave in the 15th century. Its massive wooden turret is a wonder, for it is puzzling outside to see what holds it up. The secret is revealed within, where we find enormous beams cut from giants of the forest, supporting trellis work mounting to the roof. Shafts of wood with moulded capitals stand by the stone piers of the arcade, and wooden struts sweep over to rest against the walls of the aisles; it is a mass of woodwork that must weigh tons, yet is so ordered that it wastes no space. It is probably the work of the carpenters who carried the roof of the nave in one majestic sweep across the aisles.

The piers of the nave are strong and dignified, and from the deep-cut foliage of one of their capitals peeps out a woman’s head with a  band across the mouth - some local scold, perhaps, pilloried by a 13th century mason for all time. An angel smiles in pleasant contrast across the nave. There is a 15th century font and two old chests, one with lovely carving of the 17th century, one 700 years old with half a tree trunk for a lid, the original hinges, and rings at the ends for lifting. But the oddest thing we have seen in a church for a long long time is in a glass case here, a fossil rib of a whale.

The village has a windmill whose sails have spun round about 300 years, and a solitary arch 600 years old in the fields beyond it. The arch is part of Thoby Priory, which has medieval walls.

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Billericay

I openly admit that I arrived in Billericay with certain preconceptions - mostly negative - and was pleasantly surprised to find a certain affinity with St Mary Magdalene. Having expected a Victorian monstrosity I rather liked the blend of the old, the Tudor tower, with the new which blends in well. The interior has had a recent makeover and is, generally, 'clean' and well done (I have to confess a weakness for Galleries)- the stairwells to the Galleries are shabby - but the hideous purple chairs are a mistake, box pews would make all the difference.

ST MARY MAGDALENE. Brick W tower of c. 1500, with set-back buttresses below and chamfered angles above continued in polygonal pinnacles. The battlements between these are stepped (cf. East Horndon). The battlements rest on a trefoil-arched corbel frieze. W window of two lights with Perp brick tracery. The W ends of the aisles in the same style, probably 1880. The interior late C18 with a shallow apse at the E end and another facing the triangle of High Street and Chapel Street to the N. Three galleries on thin cast-iron columns. - FONT. Bowl with two cherubs’ heads, C18. - COMMUNION RAIL. C18.

BILLERICAY. It has quaint old buildings and tragic memories;the thread of English history runs through it. In a neighbouring wood the followers of Jack Straw were caught and massacred on their way home in the great Peasants Rebellion, a tragic chapter for a village; but it is the human tragedy of a little group of people who died for their faith that is so poignant here.

To walk down the High Street is like walking through 400 years. The village grew up round a chapel attached to Great Burstead, but it has left Great Burstead far behind, though its old folk are still buried with their ancestors in the shadow of that splendid church. Billericay’s church is 18th century, with galleries all round, but it has a medieval brick tower with a crow-stepped parapet and pinnacles, and its bell has been ringing 600 years. Behind the church is a row of 16th and 17^th century cottages, and in front of it is the Chantry House with timbers that must have been growing when the Conqueror came, for the house was built in 1510. One of the cottages has a medieval barn built with upright logs. In Chapel Street is a chapel founded in 1672, and its graveyard faces Mayflower Hall, which has a tablet commemorating a gallant company of village heroes, Christopher Martin and his wife Marie, her brother-in-law Solomon Prower, and their servant John Langerman. They sailed in the Mayflower on the most historic voyage of the modern world. There is still here for us to see something of the mill in which they ground the flour for provisioning this famous ship.

Christopher Martin was a boy on these hills in the days of Queen Elizabeth, when men were free to believe in God and worship Him in any way they pleased. The village had its bitter memories of Mary Tudor and her reign of terror, and old Widow Watts would tell little Christopher how her husband died at Chelmsford rather than deny his faith, and how her boys were willing to be burned with their father. Then there was the story of the three young girls of Billericay, Elizabeth Thackwell, Margaret Ellis, and Joan Hornes, who were burned at Smithfield one bright May morning for being Protestants. Joan had appeared before the Bishop of London and told him to his face that she began to learn the faith at eleven years old, and that she would continue in it, God helping her. Then, like another Joan a hundred years and more before her, she walked into the fire.

Christopher Martin grew up when these stories were being told in the village, and in time he married the Widow Prower at the altar of Great Burstead church. They joined a church in Chelmsford and in course of time crossed over to Holland and joined William Brewster and his friends at Leyden, where John Robinson was their minister. But there was ever the fear of a Dutch war with Spain, and at last their grim poverty, the temptations before their children, and their growing desire to spread the gospel in distant lands, stirred a spirit of unrest among them, and they set longing eyes towards America, the new-found world.

In the beginning of 1619 the little Dutch colony sent Christopher Martin and two others to England to arrange for the voyage across the Atlantic, and they came to the Thames, chartered the Mayflower, and set to work to provision her. One summer’s evening in 1620 Christopher and Marie Martin, Solomon Prower, and John Langerman, walked for the last time down the hill at Billericay to join the Mayflower at Leigh. Christopher was the treasurer, as one of the most trusted of this devoted band, but, alas for the tragedy of human courage, neither he nor his wife, nor any of the Billericay people, survived to leave their names in the new world, for every one of them perished in the terrible sickness which slew one-third of the Mayflower’s pilgrims in the first winter, spent on board the ship, lying off the coast where now stands the Massachusetts town of Plymouth.

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Simon K.

While I was at Mountnessing, the rain stopped falling. The church there feels very remote, but this is the tipping off point into the Essex everyone thinks they know about, for within two miles I was entering Billericay by the back door. 

Billericay is a large, dull and surprisingly hilly town. It has lots of churches, though none of them are of any interest. Pevsner recalls that Billericay was described in White's Essex in the 1860s as 'a decayed market town'. There are some good surviving 17th and 18th century buildings in the High Street, and the modern buildings have been designed to fit in, but the result is so dull and middle brow, and the traffic so awful, that it is hard to admire anything.

Billericay became a large town because it was designated for London overspill, and the various estates were built by competing London boroughs. It is a salutary comparison with Brentwood, a few miles off and of similar size (about 80,000 people). Brentwood grew organically as three or four towns and villages grew together over several centuries. Billericay is a planted town of the 1960s and 1970s.

The historic parish church sits on the grid-locked High Street. I came here on the Historic Churches Bike Ride day, but I found it locked, no keyholder, not taking part in the bike ride.

A most unusual church. A 15th century tower clamped round by an 18th Century red brick church, the whole thing forming a traffic island. I suspect the exterior is more interesting than the interior.


Simon K.

The most interesting feature of this large, dull town is the range of post-war churches. St John sits in the suburb of Outward Green.

It was Historic Churches Bike Ride day. It was already midday, but I was their first cyclist. They were so lovely that I did not feel I could refuse their offer of coffee and a biscuit. I liked this church, but not because of that.

(St Paul was on my church list but I took one look at it and moved on - Simon didn't).

Simon K - URC.

Little Burstead

I rather suspect that St Mary the Virgin is normally locked and that I struck lucky in that when I arrived there were what I took to be a team of people doing Community Service tidying the churchyard and as a result it was open.

I rather liked the straightforward exterior Nave and Chancel with a plain wooden belfry, the simple interior and a, what I took to be, much damaged Flemish window - it's not a top ten but if you like simplicity and a lovely location it's well worth a visit even if it is normally locked; not something I often say.

ST MARY. In a nice position overlooking rolling country. Wooden belfry, C15, resting on six posts with beams on braces, and crowned by a shingled broach spire. Norman nave - see one N window. Also in the N wall of the nave a small C13 lancet. Chancel with early C16 brick windows, three-light with Perp panel tracery at the E end, two-light on the S side. The nave roof is of the C15 and has tie-beams on braces and king-posts. The braces rest on angel corbels. The chancel roof, a little later, has braces connected with the tie-beams by tracery. - PLATE. Cup and Paten of 1629.

LITTLE BURSTEAD. It looks across the flat country stretching to the Thames, and has two Elizabethan houses, Hatches Farm and Stockwell Hall. The hall has a great clock with a face on which the figures are in blackened bones. The tiny church is 700 years old, built on a knoll and seen from afar. The nave is only 12 yards long, its west end filled with grand old beams supporting the medieval turret and its shingled spire. The tower arch is fashioned from the timbers. There is a brass engraved with skulls in memory of Mary Walton of 1678, and under the chancel lies that Sir George Walton who served under Rodney, captured a squadron of Spanish ships at one fell swoop, and in reporting to the Admiralty wrote, “the number as per margin.”

There is a little medieval woodwork preserved from the old screen and worked into the new, a little more in the modern reredos, and the church has treasured a piece of oak with fading colours which formed a background to a little altar before the Reformation. Two windows have delicately coloured glass of the 17th century, one with portraits of Christ and eight Apostles, each in a perfect little landscape. They are gems, probably by an artist from Flanders. One has Philip carrying a rustic-looking cross as he goes out to evangelise the world. The font is 15th century, and so is the roof, and on the doorway are mass dials by which the village told the time in the days before clocks.

Simon K -

The village sits just to the south of Billericay, the church some way south of it, remote, locked, and not taking part in the Historic Churches Bike Ride. No sign up on the main road to tell you this - thanks guys, I hope you won't mind me putting in an objection if you ever apply for a grant from the Essex Historic Churches Trust.

A typical small Essex church, a quarter of a mile or so from the nearest lane, wooden bell tower. The view below is of the vast Thames Valley industrial complex - you could just make out the Dartford crossing.

A disgracefully neglected little church, as if it has already been abandoned. Very sad. I headed on through reassuringly remote lanes to Heronsgate and then down the Thurrock road to East Horndon.

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