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St Mary, Salcott-cum-Virley

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This is the marsh country. Salcott Creek flows out through its channel into the mouth of the Blackwater by Mersea Island, and this is smuggler country, Essex Serpent country. There were two separate parishes here, Salcott with its church on the south side of the Creek and Virley to the north. Virley church was the church in Sabine Baring-Gould's 1880 Gothic mystery novel Mehalah, described by a critic at the time as the Wuthering Heights of the Essex Marshes. Baring-Gould was for ten years the Rector of East Mersea a few miles from here, before returning as Lord of the Manor, patron and rector to the family estate of Lew Trenchard in Devon, but he supplemented his meagre income by writing novels, hymns (Onward Christian Soldiers was one of his) and newspaper articles arguing for social reform. He was an antiquarian who had excavated a Roman Villa in France at the age of fifteen, and a collector of Devon folksongs, committing their words and tunes to paper in the only record that survives of many of them. He spoke seven languages fluently, and it is said that at one time there were more books by Baring-Gould on the British Library catalogue than by any other living author. Virley church is now a ruin on private land, for on the morning of the 22nd of April 1884 came the great Essex earthquake. It destroyed hundreds of buildings in the Colchester area, including a dozen churches, a couple beyond repair. Virley church was not repaired, but Salcott church was, now serving both parishes. Externally it is a simple structure, the nave of a 14th Century church being augmented a century later with a tower and porch. At some point the chancel was taken down, and then there was a restoration by Frederic Chancellor in the 1870s, rebuilding the north wall of the nave, but that was before the earthquake of course. The current chancel was added in the 1890s, the roof appears to be also of this date. The materials of the external walls, as you'd expect around here, are a mixture of puddingstone and river rubble neatly squared off with dressed stone. Because of this story of the building's development you might anticipate a gloomy, anonymous High Victorian interior, but nothing could be further from the truth. You step through the south porch into a delightful feel of space and light, the nave and chancel furnished simply in the rural Anglo-Catholic tradition. A statue of the Blessed Virgin stands above candles in the blocked north doorway, and when you turn to the east the open chancel is a perfect setting for William Lawson's lovely 1930 depiction of the Risen Christ flanked by St Helen, the patron saint of Colchester, and St Cedd, the patron saint of Essex. The other windows in chancel and nave are clear except for two, both interesting in their different ways. One has glass by Kempe & Co depicting the Nativity. It remembers Edward Stephenson Starbuck, sometime Rector of this parish. Starbuck died in 1878, so either the glass survived the earthquake or it was installed afterwards, and his inscription begins in Honour of the Holy Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, suggesting an Anglo-Catholic enthusiasm on the part of the Reverend Starbuck or of those who placed the window here. Starbuck was only 27 years old when he died, so he cannot have been rector here for long. His incumbency was contemporaneous with that of Sabine Baring-Gould's across the Strood Channel at East Mersea, so they must have known each other. Was Baring-Gould's influence on Starbuck partly responsible for beginning the Anglo-Catholic tradition in this place, I wonder? Baring-Gould was seventeen years older than Starbuck, but remarkably he would live until 1923. The other glass is a Millennium window at the west of the north side of the nave. It depicts a curlew taking off over Salcott church and, curiously, the symbol used by the Catholic Church to signify the Jubilee Year declared for the Millennium. Simon Knott, December 2021 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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