THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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St Mary, Farnham

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. One of the county's most remote churches, stuck in a fold of fields at the end of a narrow lane in that hook of Essex beyond the Hertfordshire town of Bishop's Stortford. The church is alone in the fields, a grand sight on a rise above the Jacobean stately home of Hassiobury in the fold beneath. It was entirely rebuilt in the 1850s by John Clarke in a jaunty flint, with exposed beams, which cannot have been entirely approved of by the ecclesiologists. The steep roofs and exposed wood gave the effect of a gingerbread house, or at least of a church for a village of gingerbread houses. It was tempting to ring the keyholder, but the church appears to have little of interest inside, and there was only a phone number, suggesting we'd have to wait for them to come and open up. I decided that the interior could not compete with the exterior, so instead we headed on through increasingly narrow and flooded winding lanes northwards to the pretty village of Manuden. Simon Knott, February 2014

 

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