THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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St Andrew, Colne Engaine

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. A gorgeous village, secreted in a wooded hilltop above the Colne Valley, with a great pub and an utterly delightful church with its red brick tower. Difficult to photograph because of its enclosure of trees, but an exceptionally good collection of 20th Century glass awaits within. The stained glass artist Arthur Erridge, who lived locally and is commemorated by a window at nearby Marks Tey, designed the 1961 memorial window to Gertrude Sewell, which depicts her alongside Mary Salome and their children. Alan Younger's 1961 lancet of St Andrew is near-cubist. The east window memorial to Louisa Botterill of 1919 depicts her, somewhat bizarrely, as St Michael. Most memorable of all, Reginald Bell's 1935 Sower and Reaper window, also used at Ellingham in Norfolk, depicts the sower and the reaping angel in front of Colne Engaine church. It remembers Katherine Courtauld, a gift from her devoted partner Mary Gladstone. As Gladstone's memorial across the church reminds us, Mary and Katherine were in a relationship all their adult lives, and lived together at Knights Farm. It is one of three mid-20th Century memorials to female couples that I know of, and all of them are in this part of north Essex. Simon Knott, October 2012

 

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