THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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St John, Little 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. After a morning spent photographing the locked churches of Braintree it was time to escape the orbit of that miserable town, and I set out south-westwards through the intensely rural lattice of narrow country lanes that thread through the oilseed rape fields. I cycled for about five miles before reaching the large village of Great Leighs. Beyond it I crossed under the busy A130 and suddenly I was in delightful wooded countryside. I followed the progress of a wide brook across the meadow, and came to pretty houses, a pretty village, a pretty bridge across the brook leading to the pretty church of Little Leighs. Open. 'This church is always open every day' said the sign on the door. It was like being in a different country. The church is almost entirely Norman, although of course they couldn't resist adding an Essex wooden bell turret on in the 19th Century. The sloping graveyard is pretty and open. It was an intense delight to actually step into a church for the first time that day. Inside, this is one of those properly rustic 19th Century interiors that, if you can't have the pre-restoration integrity surviving, are the next best thing in small rural churches. Good 19th Century glass, some imposing 18th Century memorials, and the delight of an early 14th Century wooden effigy of a Priest, which Pevsner described as being of 'a startling and moving simplicity', which is exactly right. This is obviously an extremely busy church, despite the size and remoteness of the village. Perhaps they all head out of Braintree and come here instead. But in fact I was now entering into the orbit of Chelmsford, in whose rural hinterland most churches seem to be open. I noticed that this church is in the same group as Little Waltham, which I had also found to be 'open every day', and so was the next one, which gave me hope as I crossed over the A130 again and skirted through hilly copses and meadows to Great Leighs church. Simon Knott, April 2014

 

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