THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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All Saints, Great Oakley

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. I came down from the ridge, and after a couple of miles came to the village of Great Oakley, a handsome place with Georgian houses and a square, though spolied a little by being on the Harwich to Clacton main road. Beyond it, the road divides, and beyond woods on a bluff looking out over open countryside is the parish church. Locked, though with a keyholder notice of sorts. The setting is stunningly lovely. The ground falls away rapidly immediately to the west of the weatherboarded tower, and the headstones below it have never been removed or reset by lawnmower enthusiasts. In short, it looks like an illustration from an 18th Century book of etchings of country churches. I almost expected to see a yokel in a smock smoking a clay pipe and sitting on a tree stump. James Bettley in the revised Pevsner implies that the inside is nothing compared with the exterior, and the curious keyholder notice said anyone wishing to discuss matters concerning the Church should ring... it gave three numbers. I thought about ringing them each in turn and posing a serious of abstruse puzzlers about eastern heresies of the fifth century, but I thought better of it and cycled on through increasingly narrow and lovely lanes through Moze to Beaumont. Simon Knott, April 2013

 

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home - index - latest - e-mail
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Norfolk churches - Suffolk churches
www.simonknott.co.uk