THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE
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St Michael, Ramsey, Harwich
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.
Here we are in suburban Harwich. The official name of the parish is Ramsey and Parkeston, and we overlook the international port, but this church is surrounded by suburban estates and fields. A battered old church, the flint tower repaired in brick and much of the 13th Century with a striking Elizabethan east window, most un-East Anglian.
Locked, no keyholder, though I could get into the porch. This was fortunate, because the star of the show here is the south doorway, an extraordinary 15th Century thing worthy of Thaxted or Southwold, with Saints, monograms and at the top the coronation of the Blessed Virgin - in a more famous church it would be much better known. Outside, a fine 19th Century memorial has large, rusty anchors forming a fence around it. While I photographed this, the woman who'd been fiddling with papers at Dovercourt tipped up. It turned out she was the Vicar. "Is it possible to see inside?" "This is your lucky day, isn't it", she replied. I took her observation to mean that it wasn't considered customary for people to be allowed to see inside Dovercourt and Ramsey churches.
A lovely interior, very early medieval, Norman tipping into EE, well cared for and the furnishings are what must have passed for high quality in the 1860s. There is a rare Commonwealth arms set. My photograph didn't come out, unfortunately, but I was glad I'd seen it. We talked for about twenty minutes, me being passionate about the future of medieval churches, her rather despondent about the ability of congregations to look after them in the future. We talked about the way funding might work, and agreed that the future looked bleak without public money.
I expect this one to be redundant in ten years time. If the CCT take it on, as they should, then it will be open and we will all be able to see inside.
Simon Knott, April 2013
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