THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE
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St John the Baptist, Layer de la Haye
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There are three Layers, and Layer de la Haye is the largest of them, a substantial village just to the south of Colchester. Football fans may remember Colchester United FC's former scruffy, dear little ground on Layer Road. The church stands in the middle of a wide churchyard, set back from the road and seeming larger than it actually is. The tower, nave and north porch are 14th Century in general, although Pevsner points out a few Norman details remaining from before the rebuilding. The south aisle and arcade date from a relatively early 19th Century restoration by Sergeant in 1849. The south porch was added in 2018 and blends in successfully. When I first visited in 2013 the entrance was through the north porch into a low, cosy interior that appears entirely of the mid-19th Century. A surprise, then, up in the chancel, for on the north side is a fine Easter Sepuchre tomb for Thomas Tey and his wife. Tey died in 1543, so this is a late example, and by the time it was installed the liturgy it would have served can only have had months to run. Heraldic glass in a south aisle window contains suns and the motto dum spiro spero, 'while I breathe I hope'.
At the time of my visit in 2013 the church had been open daily, although going back post-Covid in the summer of 2021 I found that this was no longer the case. I remembered the two friendly churchwardens who'd been inside doing the books and playing the organ. It had been my last church of the day, and their friendly chat obviously distracted me, because when I got home to Ipswich I found that I had left my copy of the Buildings of England volume for Essex in the church. Fortunately I found the phone number for one of the churchwardens, and she very kindly put it in a safe place for me to collect. It seemed a friendly place altogether, I recall.
Simon Knott, December 2021
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