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St Mary, Great Bentley

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Great Bentley's claim to the largest village green in England is not undisputed even in East Anglia, but to stand in the middle of the wide, flat forty-five acres that sprawl to the east of the church is to think the claim a credible one. The village sits on the Colchester to Frinton railway line, outer suburbia really but large enough to have a life of its own. The church is not large, but attractively set in its garden-like churchyard, essentially Norman but with a chancel added about 1300, so not unusual for north Essex. Also not unusual, given how close we are to the Stour estuary, is the use of puddingstone and river rubble in its construction. You enter the church from the north, into a nave which feels all of its 1860s restoration, the chancel also looking crisp and clean to the east. A large extension was added on to the south side of the church in the 1980s, but if you step into it and look back you can see that the former south doorway is a fine piece of the late 12th Century, and would presumably have once been the main entrance to the church. The glass depicting Christ suffering the children to come unto him is typically sound early 1960s work by Alfred Wilkinson, and there are two good mid-19th Century memorials to members of the Thompson family of Brook House, including one to Frederick Heckford Thompson of this parish and of Catherine Mount Estate, Montego Bay, Jamaica. He died in 1862, and was interred in the grounds belonging to the parish church, Montego Bay. Catherine Mount was a large sugar cane estate on the north side of the island owned by the wealthy Reynolds family of Milford, Hampshire. At the time that slavery was abolished in Jamaica in the 1830s it was worked by more than one hundred and thirty slaves, many of whom presumably continued to work on the estate as poorly paid apprentices. Simon Knott, January 2022 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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