THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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St Nicholas, Tillingham

A rugged greenstone church in a large, remote village out on the end of the Dengie Peninsula. The church sits by the attractive village square, and there are records of a church here back into the 7th Century, when the manor was granted to the Bishop of London by the King of Kent. The interior is idiosyncratic, as if it has gone its own way for centuries without too much reference to the rest of England. The highlights are the late Norman font, AK Nicholson's scheme of glass and a rare East Anglian instance of 19th Century glass by Frederick Drake of Exeter, which you can't help thinking must have arrived by sea. A peaceful, numinous spot, and it felt like I was out on the end of something, beyond here only what Betjeman recalled in his poem Essex as the level wastes of sucking mud, where distant barges high with hay come sailing in upon the flood. Tillingham and the surrounding villages were the heartland of the Peculiar People, a 19th Century evangelical sect which combined strict Methodism with faith-healing, spurning modern medicine. A famous case in 1910 saw members of the sect prosecuted for not seeking medical attention for their children during the 1910 Essex diphtheria outbreak. A couple of their chapels survive as private houses. One was still in use by the sect into the 1950s, although today the sect has been subsumed into a larger union of evangelical churches. Simon Knott, April 2018

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