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St Peter and St Paul, Bardfield Saling

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This pretty round-towered, red-roofed church sits with just a farmhouse for company in the rolling landscape between Braintree and Thaxted, a captivating sight as you come over the rise from the direction of Great Saling. The first time I ever visited was in late October, and I recall the tower rising dramatically above the bare boughs of its tight churchyard, a sentinel across the ploughed fields. Coming this way in high summer finds the church secretive behind boilings of deep green, an island in a sea of golden barley. Tower and nave are pretty much entirely of the 14th Century. The chancel was too, but it has suffered over the years, being truncated in the early 18th Century, rebuilt in the 19th Century and then damaged by a stray German bomb in 1941 leaving the shed-like apse that we see today, although the canted roof makes it attractive. Stepping inside, you find yourself in a space at once ancient and neatly-kept, with an 18th Century west gallery above the 14th Century font at the west end of the nave. The furnishings are cut-down box pews, and there is barely any coloured glass, creating a pleasing atmosphere of old wood, brick and stone. The pulpit is an oddity, at first sight a cut-down 17th Century triple-decker piece, although on closer inspection it looks more as if a 17th Century pulpit has been plonked on a platform faced with 17th Century panelling. The south aisle forms the St Catherine chapel, apparently the site of a shrine before the Reformation, for chunks of masonry have been recovered from the churchyard over the years that appear to have been part of an elaborate 14th Century structure. They are on display in the aisle. An attractive 14th Century parclose screen separates the east end of the south aisle from the nave and chancel. James Bettley tells us that from the 1880s to the 1940s it formed the reredos in the then-chancel, framing the straw work which is now on display at the west end of the south aisle. And the aisle has one more unusual feature of interest. Many churches have graffiti of one kind or another, but there are two particularly interesting examples cut into the arcade here. One appears to show a man in a tall puritan hat, and another what may be a Bishop, or possibly a devil. Simon Knott, December 2021 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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