THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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St Mary, Birchanger

Click on the 'play' symbol in the second image to see all my photographs of this church as a slide show, then click on any image in the slideshow to see it large in a new page. Alternatively, if you don't have flash enabled, you can go straight to the set for this church on flickr. I finally mopped up the last bit of Essex north of the Harlow-Chelmsford-Maldon line. The area covered by this cycling trip was always bound to be the last - it is a long way away from my house in Ipswich, it includes a large benefice where the churches are kept locked, and although one of the churches is a bit of a star the others are all said to be unexciting (in fact, this is quite wrong - I visited two churches which will be in my Essex top 30). But the weather forecast for west Essex was good, and the countryside looked fine for cycling, and so I set off on the 0616 to Cambridge, changing there for the Liverpool Street line, getting off at Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire. I headed out on the Stansted road, entering Essex before I left the urban area. Out on the edge of the urban area, but isolated from it by being stretched along a country road, was the pleasant village of Birchanger, although unfortunately it had the first church in the 'difficult' benefice. This was the first of a number of churches today to have been built or rebuilt by George Pritchett, a decidedly middle-brow run-of-the-mill architect whose father was Rector of a nearby parish. Here, he rebuilt a small, Norman church in the style of, well, a small Norman church, retaining two splendid doorways which are visible from the outside and are the stars of the piece. The tympanum of one appears at first sight to show a five-legged camel, but it instantly put me in mind of the relief at Santon Downham of the wolf with a tree growing out of its back. I think that this is the same image here. From here I had been wondering how to cross the M11, because the road over the bridge here is a dual carriageway, but a two mile bridleway has been redesignated a cycle way, and I took it. Well, it was a breath-taking journey, down and then up steeply through copses and woodland. Suddenly I was on a thunderous bridge over the M11 which brought me down along the edge of the car parks for Stansted airport. Tunnels carried the route under airport service roads, and where the M11 and A120 (almost a motorway in itself) meet, the path descended through woodland. A Ryan Air jet came down with an extraordinary noise above my head (I swear I could see the pilot) and then, in the midst of this madness, I came into a woodland clearing and a deer stood cropping, not twenty yards away. It hadn't hear me because of the jet. When it turned and saw me, well - I now understand what the phrase 'jumped out of its skin' might look like. Rabbits too scattered in all directions, and suddenly I was up on the old Bishops Stortford to Dunmow road, crossing it and down into Great Hallingbury. Simon Knott, May 2014

 

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home - index - latest - e-mail
links - small print - about this site
Norfolk churches - Suffolk churches
www.simonknott.co.uk