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St Peter and St Paul, Black Notley

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Cressing railway station sits in pleasant countryside, but you head westwards up the other side of the valley into Black Notley and enter Braintree's long, dull stretch of southern suburbia. As often, I was struck by the number of obviously busy and active non-conformist churches in this area. The one in the main street here was called Braintree Vine Church. Were these modern chapels the cause of the moribund state of the Church of England in the Braintree area? Or were they a result of it? I headed in the direction of central Braintree before cutting off into the fields and finding Black Notley church, not without difficulty, because although the building is obvious enough, the access roads to it are marked with notices reading private road. The church sits in an idyllic setting beside a farm, and you wouldn't think you were barely two miles from the centre of town. It is a trim little church, but some nave windows betray its Norman origins. Indeed, Pevsner thought that at least some of the ironwork on the south door was likely to be 12th Century. Two brick buttresses support the east end of the chancel, one of them dated 1682, suggesting essential repairs after the long night of the Commonwealth. I thought that this church was a really good example of how clever an idea an Essex bell tower is, for although this is just a ordinary flint two-celled building, you put a little wooden turret on top and hey presto, you turn it into a Church. The turret is supported inside the church by posts which create that familiar Essex aisled feeling at the west end of the nave. I'd have liked to have seen this for myself, but the church was locked without a keyholder notice. Even the outer porch doors were locked here, but the big west window is low and full of clear glass, so looking through it you can see almost everything. The church underwent a significant restoration by Sir Arthur Blomfield in the 1870s which I suppose will inevitably have given it its interior character. Unusually for around here it looked High Church inside, with six big candlesticks on the altar, and above it splendid early 1950s glass by Francis Stephens and the young John Hayward, at which I would also have very much liked a closer look. It replaced glass by Heaton, Butler & Bayne installed as part of Blomfield's restoration, but which was blown out by a bomb in the Second World War. I'm told that surviving fragments have been incorporated into a new window in the early 21st Century parish meeting rooms nearby. The flaming obelisk memorial to the south of the nave is the last resting place of John Ray, the botanist. I pottered around the churchyard for a while, but there was no point in hanging about, so after a short conversation with a lady tending a grave - "isn't it a lovely day!" "yes, much better than the forecast!" - I got on my bike and headed back to Black Notley's main street, heading south and leaving Braintree's urban area behind at last, perhaps forever. Simon Knott, March 2022 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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