THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE
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Norfolk
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St Mary, Great Leighs
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.
Locked without a keyholder notice, but a sign said 'we are sorry that the church is currently closed'. The church must be a good two miles from the centre of the busy village, with just a couple of big houses for company.
This, famously, is one of Essex's seven round-towered churches. It is probably the biggest tower, a sturdy late-Norman affair with a grand Norman west doorway. More significantly for me, it was my very last East Anglian round-towered church, I've now visited them all. (In fact, Essex has one more, at South Ockendon, but that is down on the Thames estuary in London suburbia, so I don't think it counts as East Anglia. Nevertheless, I do wish I'd carried on for the extra couple of miles south when I got as far as North Ockendon last September).
Otherwise a big church with a grand porch, very attractive. I don't know why it was closed. I looked at the service schedule and there had not been any services in recent weeks, although one was scheduled for Easter Day. Perhaps they were closed for redecoration, though there was no sign of builders' equipment. Perhaps they were treating the inside for death-watch beetle, I don't know. It wasn't possible to see through the windows.
But the countryside was increasingly lovely, the weather increasingly warm, I had the light breeze behind me for the rest of the afternoon, so I didn't mind too much.Simon Knott, April 2014
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