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All Saints, Tolleshunt Knights

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A lonely and rather lovely if ramshackle church. You come almost two miles from busy Tolleshunt Knights, a suburb of the town of Tiptree, down a narrow lane, the route of a disused railway. About halfway between village and church you pass a Russian Orthodox monastery, and they have the ownership of this little church now. It was a Norman church at heart, but has been much altered and patched up over the centuries without ever being appreciable enlarged, and there has never been a tower. It was abandoned in 1957 and the recently established Orthodox community bought it for their use, but I am afraid that it is a poor thing, cracks in the walls and damp under the eaves. I imagine that the quietism of Orthodoxy will probably just let it fall. The church is kept locked without a keyholder notice, as indeed all the Tolleshunt churches are. I have been inside the church, but it was many years ago, about thirty I should think, on a field trip that Suffolk Education Authority ran for teachers when education authorities still did that kind of thing. It was a 'spend a day in an Orthodox monastery' trip, so how could I possibly resist. At the end of a fascinating day we attended the evening liturgy in the church which went on for some two hours. It was fabulous, although it was so dark inside the church that I remember almost nothing about it other than that there were few furnishings apart from an iconostasis stretched across the former entrance to the chancel. On one occasion in more recent years, I was cycling back up the hill towards the monastery when I spotted a nun walking down in the opposite direction. She could only have been going to the church, perhaps to set it up for the evening liturgy, but it seemed inappropriate to ask her if she had the key. We exchanged greetings, but I don't suppose my very limited Russian or perhaps her English could have let me get across what I wanted. But in any case the Orthodox church does not normally allow photographs of its icons. Simon Knott, December 2021 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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