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St Giles, Great Hallingbury

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. Great Hallingbury is on the outskirts of the Hertfordshire town of Bishop's Stortford, where I disembarked shortly after 8am. I headed north to Birchanger to visit the church there, and then turned my attention to this one. 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. A grand village rather than a pretty one, with lots of large houses. It is directly on the flight path, and it was surreal to see these big jets, almost standing still as they approached the runway, skimming the tops of trees and houses. It wasn't so much the noise (though there was noise) but these great lumbering beasts were just so close! At the far end of the village is St Giles, locked with a keyholder notice. This is a vast gloomy church in a vast gloomy churchyard, although it looks better from the air - this is the spire that sits on one end of the runway at Stansted, and there are far more pictures of it taken from the air than from the ground. A big spired, aisled church by George Pritchett bankrolled by the Houblon family of Hallingbury Hall and Bank of England fame. I didn't go for the key (I am reaching a time in my life when I feel I have seen enough big, middle-brow Victorian churches) and headed on, crossing the M11 westwards again to Little Hallingbury. Simon Knott, May 2014

 

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