East Mersea

St Edmund King & Martyr was, without doubt, the church of the day - the exterior and location are good but the interior is outstanding. Light on monuments but a really good Jacobean pulpit with tester and a good font, the glory here belongs to the collection of, mainly, Flemish glass medallions.

Strangely under reported, all the windows, except the east chancel, are plain glass with the medallions set therein. This makes for a wonderfully light and airy interior; despite the fact that the pews have been replaced with classroom chairs I loved this church.

ST EDMUND KING AND MARTYR. Big Perp stone W tower with diagonal buttresses, battlements and higher stair turret. At the base a little fiushwork decoration. Of the same time most of the church - see the tracery of the windows. However, several were replaced in the C18 by big bare pointed openings. Perp N arcade of four bays with tall two-centred arches and piers of a section in which four deeply undercut attached shafts are connected by deep hollows so that a non-intermittent wavy section results. The chancel arch and the arch from the chancel to the N chapel are of the same type. - FONT. Octagonal, C15, with uncommonly pretty blank arches. - PULPIT. Early C17, still with its tester. - PLATE. Elizabethan Cup with two bands of ornament.

EAST MERSEA. It is said that the Danes took refuge here in Alfred’s day; and nearly a thousand years afterwards English troops were garrisoning the church during our wars with the Dutch and the French. There is still an ancient moat near the church, and close by is a lovely garden in the shadow of noble pines, a charming bit of Essex which we may see by opening a door and peeping in.

There is much to delight us on this island of trees and hedgerows, a patch of loveliness separated from the mainland by the Pyefleet Creek, which was famous for oysters in the days when Baring Gould was preaching here before he went to live in Devon. He put this village into one of his books, and ministered in the bare church that has been here 600 years. It has a 15th century font with a bowl resting on angels, fragments of glass painted in Chaucer’s day, and a beautiful pulpit carved in Stuart times, still with its canopy and the stand of the old hourglass.

Simon K -

From Colchester station, I cycled eleven miles and across the Strood causeway onto Mersea Island. I do like the Essex coast, and as I crossed the mudflats at low tide I recalled Betjeman and ...the level wastes of sucking mud, where distant barges high with hay come sailing in upon the flood... but once you are on the island it is little different from the rest of agricultural East Anglian north Essex, except for the concentration of caravanners' cars.

The town is West Mersea, but at the other end of the island alone in the fields (apart from the caravans) is St Edmund. 

Open. This church is a surprise, a delight. The rugged exterior of ragstone gives way to a beautiful, simple interior, very reminiscent of nearby Fingringhoe, one of my favourites. Clean white walls, brick floors, modern chairs. The church feels almost entirely untouched by the Victorians. The clear glass of the windows is punctuated by about 20 Flemish roundels of the 16th and 17th centuries. A 17th century pulpit with hourglass is stranded high up by the south wall after the removal of the box pews in the 1920s.

The feeling is light, well-kept and devotional. This is a super church, and needs to be in my Essex top 20.

Flickr.

West Mersea

SS Peter & Paul has a lovely exterior, is in a great location but internally is rather bare with Ikea like furnishings. It has some nice fittings - two Della Robbia plaques (one old, one new), a 2005 memorial window in the south aisle commemorating the island's fishermen and oystermen - but it's not great.

The rendering has been removed from the south aisle, revealing a piece of Saxon carving, which gives a somewhat odd affect and there's quite a bit of unnecessary poor quality C20 painting.

Having said that it was open which is always a plus.

ST PETER AND ST PAUL. The church lies in the small original village area of what is now an extensive, but not yet badly spoiled seaside resort. The W tower in its lower parts is Early Norman. One N and one S window belong to that style. There were then no buttresses. Later, probably in the C14, buttresses were added, and the upper parts of the tower with handsome two-light transomed bell-openings and battlements. The rest of the church is also late medieval. Brick N porch, brick chancel, and brick E window of the S aisle. The nave was heightened in brick in 1833. Inside the church the severely plain tower arch clearly belongs to the Early Norman period, the S arcade of four bays with its octagonal piers and triple-chamfered arches to the C14. - FONT. Of the Purbeck type, C13, octagonal, with two of the usual shallow blank pointed arches to each side. - PAINTING. Pretty cartouches with biblical inscriptions on the upper nave walls. The date is no doubt. that of the heightening of the nave. - SCULPTURE. Lunette by Giovanni Della Robbia (?) Christ and three Angels. Clearly no earlier than the mid C16. - ROYAL ARMS. C18, carved, on the W wall.

WEST MERSEA. There are Roman tiles in its Saxon tower and Roman fragments appear wherever men dig about the churchyard. We must believe that this mouth of the Blackwater river was a Roman centre of importance. Here a mosaic pavement about 20 feet square and gay with roses and ivy leaves was laid bare 200 years ago, and smaller pavements have since been found. A little way from the church men digging a sawpit exposed a mass of concrete resembling a six-spoked wheel 200 feet round, with 12 little buttresses spaced on the rim. The nature of the round building these foundations supported is a mystery; some antiquaries think it would be a monument like those on the Appian Way, others that here stood a lighthouse or a watchtower.

It was richer booty that fell to the excavators on opening a barrow on a farm a mile along the road to Colchester. Just below the level of the farmyard they found a small tiled chamber in which was a lead casket, 13 inches square and deep, containing a bowl of pale green glass. In this bowl were the ashes of a Roman who had been cremated in the first century.

From ruins of those days the Saxon builders of the tower picked up the masonry for the corners of a massive tower over 12 feet square. In its walls are their round openings with narrow splays, while the arch opening into the nave is shaped by Roman tiles and is nearly four feet thick. Made new in the 14th century, the Saxon church has two red consecration crosses still on the wall, and there is a marble font brought here by the Normans, resting on a round marble pier which some believe to have been found among the Roman ruins. Under the tower are two worn chests. Bright and shining is a 16th century lunette fixed in an aisle; it is a piece of Della Robbia ware in green and blue and white, with a reverent sculpture of Christ after Calvary, angels supporting him.

Flickr.

Little Wigborough

St Nicholas is a pretty little church situated in the grounds of Copt Hall which contains little of interest but does contain a strut from the Zeppelin L33.

On the night of 23/24 September 1916, Zeppelins set out to bomb London. These were newly designed and built Zeppelins, superior to the Zeppelins which had previously flown over England.

Zeppelin L33 was damaged by anti-aircraft fire and was forced to land at New Hall Farm, Little Wigborough, only twenty yards from a nearby house. The occupants of the house, a man, his wife and three children, ran for their lives as the airship hit the ground. The crew ran from the craft (the only time armed Germans set foot in England during the war)and shortly after it exploded.

Special Constable Edgar Nicholas, who lived nearby, made his way to the scene and came across the crew walking along a road. They identified themselves as the Zeppelin crew and he arrested them. Other officers later joined them and the local constable, PC 354 Charles Smith, arranged for the prisoners to be handed over to the military to be taken off to a prisoner-of-war camp.

The airship was the subject of great attention by spectators, but the guarding of it was expeditiously arranged by the military as parts of the airship were still relatively undamaged. Indeed, she was later studied in great detail and many aspects of her design were incorporated into later British airship designs.

It also has a monument to Zeppelina Williams 1916-2004. She was born shortly after L33 crashed in Great Wigborough and the doctor who delivered suggested the name to commemorate the occasion!

ST NICHOLAS. Late C15 nave, chancel and narrower W tower heightened insufficiently in 1888. The S side lies open towards the estuary of the Blackwater. Inside a nice display of Victorian church ironwork; Communion Rail, Lectern, Font Cover support - all scrolly and artistic.

LITTLE WIGBOROUGH. Its medieval stone church has little enough to keep it company -  few cottages, a farm or two in fields running into marshland penetrated by creeks of the Blackwater river, that is all.

Yet it has a memory of something that had hardly ever happened in the world before when it happened here, for one September night in the Great War, when the Zeppelins were striking terror all over England, one of them came down, spread its 680 feet across the farm track leading to this church, and set up such a blaze as was never seen before in these flat Essex fields. It was the L33, one of a fleet of 12 Zeppelins which raided this country on September 23, 1916. Struck while trying to reach London, she at first tried to cross the sea, flying low and chased by our planes; then she came down, thundering like a score of goods trains and settling a few yards from a wooden cottage. The 22 Germans in her shouted a warning to the terrified inhabitants and then set fire to the Zeppelin, using their incendiary bombs; so fierce was the fire that the paint of the cottage was scorched. Carrying one of the crew who was wounded, the Germans threw away their arms and marched on the road towards Colchester, where they met a constable, to whom they made formal surrender.

Simon K -

Without an OS map, this would be a difficult church to find. I knew it was down the end of a mile-or-so long track, and at the end is Copt Hall, a National Trust site overlooking the Blackwater, but I could see no sign of the church. It wasn't where it seemed as if it should be. And then I noticed on the large PRIVATE sign outside the Big House that it said 'visitors to the church on foot only', so I walked through the gate and there was the church at the other end of the front garden. 

A tiny church in a tiny churchyard, substantially rebuilt after the earthquake of 1884, and I thought it might be redundant but it is still in use by the benefice. It is very much like Abberton on the other side of the reservoir.

Very simple inside. A Zeppelin crashed across the lane leading to the church in 1916. There is a gravestone to someone who was killed, and inside the church a length of the aluminium framework. On the wall is a memorial to a Zeppelina Williams who died in 2004 and had been born in the parish on the night of the crash. It is obviously still the most exciting thing to have happened in the parish in the last century. Since the earthquake, in fact.

Flickr.

Virley

Lying just over a mile west of the Wigboroughs, Virley is a small village that appears to owe its name to its Norman owner at the time of the Domesday Book, Robert de Verli. St Mary's Church at Virley was one of the buildings most heavily damaged by the earthquake of 1884 with towers, parapets and roofs partially collapsing. Whilst St Mary the Virgin in Salcott was rebuilt St Mary, which was already in poor repair before being finished off by the earthquake, was left ruined.

More information can be found here.

ST MARY. A ruin, but a ruin kept visually attractive. The remaining walls all in ivy, herbaceous borders inside the nave. The only feature of strictly architectural interest is the chancel arch. Transitional style, i.e. round arch with two slight chamfers, resting on semi-octagonal responds.