High Beech, Essex

Twice this week I have traipsed down to High Beech with the intent of finishing off the M11 corridor at the south west corner of my catchment area (including Loughton, the Chigwells, Buckhurst Hill and others) and possibly going back to Old Harlow to attempt ingress.

The first time I arrived to find that I had left my camera battery at home on the charger and today I discovered that I had a flat battery in the camera!

I'll try again next week - at least I now know that High Beech is normally open between 11 and 1 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

UPDATE: Aug 2012. Of course I came back to Holy Innocents after 1pm and found it once again locked but having gained entrance on my last visit there's little of interest inside.

Personally I prefer Pevsner's entry finding Mee somewhat overflowery even if this is a beautiful site.

HIGH BEECH. 1873 by Sir Arthur Blomfield. Right in Epping Forest, surrounded by old trees everywhere. Grey stone with a NW spire, transepts, and an apse.

UPDATE: 05/03/13. Passed by, unexpectedly, on the way to Waltham Cross and found it open (unfortunately preparing for a funeral)   and took the opportunity to take interiors - I was right last time this is an astonishingly dull church.

HIGH BEECH. It is the jewelled crown of Epping Forest; it was the beauty of it that attracted the greatest English poet of the Victorian Era to come here to live. It has little that man gave it save a few cottages and isolated houses and a modern church, but has the solitude of a noble beech wood Nature gave it, and we walk in it as in some great cathedral. In the tranquillity of these green shrines and grey altars our ancestors have walked for many generations, and here Tennyson loved to walk. He lived here through the first three years of the Victorian Era in which he was to be a shining figure.

It had been a painful farewell to Somersby, where the Tennysons had been living at the rectory, but things were financially difficult and they decided to come nearer London, and lived here till 1840, when they went into Kent. The poet had lost one pleasant brook at Somersby and was to find another at Boxley, but here in Essex it was Epping Forest that was his delight. He took a practical interest in furnishing the house, and we are told that he did not forget the kitchen things, and that he bought pretty and inexpensive furniture.

There was a pond in the park on which he would skate in his long blue cloak. He loved to go to his friends in town; and, coming back in the evening, would often notice "the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn."

It was in these days that he was engaged to Emily Sellwood, but they were too poor to marry; he was even too poor to travel, and one of the letters he wrote from here regretted that he would never be able to see the Eternal City and the dome of St Peter’s. There was a night when a great thunderstorm broke over High Beech, and the poet always remembered two experiences of this storm. One was that a friend saw a great fire ball come up the valley and burst over Tennyson’s pond "like 50 batteries of cannon"; the other was that when Tennyson went up to his mother’s room he found her on the floor, crying, "Oh, I will leave this house - the storms are very bad here."

These were his very early days, before fame and fortune found him. He longed in vain to see the Lincolnshire coast, but "the journey is so expensive and I am so poor." Yet he enjoyed life here, and here he lived in his imagination in the past and in the future. It may have been the thought of the submerged forest under the Thames Marshes that led him to write:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
O, Earth, what changes thou hast seen;

at any rate he wrote it here in Essex when working on In Memoriam, and here he wrote The Talking Oak and Locksley Hall; here he

Dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the worldwide whisper of the south wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunderstorm;
Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battleflags were furled In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

Here also he heard the bells of Waltham Abbey which inspired him to write perhaps the best known of all his verses, Ring Out, Wild Bells.

Flickr.

Little Laver, Essex

My planned visits finished for the day I set off properly for home and coincidentally passed through Little Laver and found myself a previously unknown about church - the Victorian St Mary the Virgin. Even though it's an apsidal church and it's open (bonus points) there's little of interest here and if, as Pevsner says, the font is Norman it has been so violently restored as to pass for a Victorian copy.

British History online says: The parish church of ST. MARY consists of nave, apse, south porch, and combined north vestry and organ chamber. The walls are of flint rubble. The porch is of timber. In 1872 the church was largely rebuilt and very little medieval work now remains.

Nothing is left of the pre-13th-century church except the font (see below). The nave was probably rebuilt in the 14th century. It retains two windows, much restored, of this date. The south window has a chamfered hood-mould externally and two much decayed head stops. The braced collar-beam roof appears to be partly ancient. The only other original feature is the trefoil-headed piscina, which is probably of the 14th century and which has been reset in the apse.

The square font bowl is of the late 12th century and is similar in character to those in some neighbouring parishes. The base is an addition of 1872 and the carving of the bowl was probably re-cut at the same time.

ST MARY THE VIRGIN. Mostly of 1872. - FONT. Square, c. 1200. The four sides have decoration with a trail of stylized foliage of the usual Norman type, three fleur-de-lis, sun, moon, a whorl, two roses, and two rosettes, and two four-petalled flowers or rather quatrefoils with rose centres. This latter detail especially makes it likely that the sculptural representations have been re-cut. - PLATE. Fragmentary Cup of 1562 and Cup of 1563; undated contemporary Paten.

LITTLE LAVER. Its village group clusters about a deep wide pool which would have pleased old Izaak Walton; we found his disciples sitting patiently under the trees. The church, the great barn, and the manor house have all tiled roofs. The church walls are 600 years old and have heads at the windows; the chancel has been rounded into an apse. The wonderful font is famous hereabouts; it was made about the year 1200 and its sloping sides have fleur-de-lis, crescents, stars, and leaves, all perfect.

Moreton, Essex

Heading in a north easterly direction I stopped at St Mary. The last time I was here, in November 2010, a funeral was being conducted and I thought it would be a trifle insensitive to take exteriors or, indeed, interiors. I may be influenced by the fact that St Mary was open but even in pouring rain this is a lovely church in a lovely spot.

To be honest there's not a lot of interest inside, although the font is amazing, but its simplicity is part of its charm.

ST MARY THE VIRGIN. Nave and chancel early C13 with lancet windows. The W tower of brick with diagonal buttresses and battlements was built in 1787. The church was much restored in 1868-9. - FONT. Square, of Purbeck marble, c. 1200. It has on one side the familiar row of shallow blank round arches, four in number, on two sides fleurs-de-lis, and on the fourth sun, moon, and a whorl. - PLATE. Almsdish of 1648; Cup and Paten of 1663.

I don't know what happened here and at Coopersale but Mee missed Moreton as well.

Coopersale, Essex

Turning for home I headed for Coopersale and the rain that had been threatening all day finally fell. I sat in the car until the shower passed and contemplated the not very interesting St Alban. It did look as though it might be unlocked but alas no.

Pevsner only mentions Coopersale in passing, and then only in connection with Coopersale House, whilst Mee missed it altogether.

Epping, Essex

St John the Baptist is a Victorian built barn of a building and so high church that at first I thought I was in a Catholic church. Inside it's noticeably Victorian and rather overblown but, for all that, I rather liked it (having read Pevsner perhaps the Edwardian influence suits Victorian buildings).

ST JOHN THE BAPTIST. Epping has no medieval church. But when it came to building a parish church of sufficient size, in 1889, the authorities were wise in the choice of their architects. They went to Bodley & Garner and got a church of remarkable dignity if not striking originality. The outstanding feature is the tower erected only in 1908-9, also by Badley. It stands at the street corner separated from nave and aisle which face the High Street with Dec windows. The tower is broad and strong with two large bell-openings on each side and three big battlements. It is all very serious, and no light relief is permitted. The motifs inside, e.g. the arcade pier and arches, are in a correct East Anglian C14th tradition. Much trouble has also been taken over the furnishing of the church. Reredos by Bodley and Hare, 1909; Rood Screen also by Bodley. - Stained Glass by Kemps (E window 1890, s aisle a window 1902).

EPPING. In the long and broad highway of this quaint market town is the very old and the new. A little before the road leaves the dense forest to skirt a wide common it passes Amesbury Banks, an ancient British plateau camp which some authorities claim as the scene of Boadicea’s last fight with the Roman legions. The camp covers 12 acres, its six-foot rampart 800 yards round, and the ditch within 10 feet deep and 20 wide. On one side is a depression through which ran a stream which provided the water for the defenders.

A double avenue of elms marches with the road across the common into the town. The wooden pens for animals on market day, and the old coaching inns and cottages, give the place an old-world look, but the magnificent church is modern. Its splendid pinnacled tower stands apart from it, with niches from which look down statues of saints and angels and one who was neither: Augustine, Alphege, Alban, Theodore, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel with a trumpet, and Archbishop Laud.

There is a great triptych behind the altar, and a pulpit with statues of the Evangelists. In a chapel is a gem of modern craftsmanship, a jewelled aumbry of copper with angels adorning it. The glass in one of the windows tells the story of the church, showing Henry the Second granting the manor of Epping with the tiny chapel of St John to the Abbot of Waltham, his jewelled crozier in his hand and a monk in a blue robe attending. In the scene is a dog, with other animals symbolising the neighbouring forest.

Flickr.

Foster Street, Essex

All Saints was built in 1874 but never consecrated, it's now a private residence.

FOSTER STREET. It is a quiet corner of our countryside but how far our thoughts run out as we stand by a grave in this hamlet, in the fields two miles from Harlow! For 200 years the Baptists of Harlow used this spot as their sacred ground, and so it is that a father and his two daughters lie here, Benjamin Flower with Sarah and Eliza. They lie in an altar tomb weathered and worn, a hundred years old and little known, yet as we stand by it we think of great crowds singing, and perhaps of a dire catastrophe, for it was Sarah Flower who wrote the words of Nearer My God to Thee and her sister who wrote the music. It has been sung for about 100 years in every church where English hymns are sung, and it was to its pathetic strains that the Titanic sank down into the waves.

Benjamin Flower was a London tradesman’s son who failed in business and, taking a traveller’s job abroad, found himself in Paris in the Revolution. He came home to edit a Cambridge newspaper, and, alone among provincial editors, he denounced the war with France. He was tried at the bar of the House of Lords for censuring the political conduct of a bishop, and for his daring he spent six months in Newgate. Here Eliza Gould visited him, she having also suffered for her Liberal opinions, and on his recovering his freedom she married him and they settled at Harlow, where he founded a printing business. They had two daughters, who found themselves motherless in 1810 and fatherless in 1829, and then devoted themselves to literature and music. Sarah wrote a religious drama called Vivia Perpetua, and many hymns set to music by her sister and sung at Finsbury Chapel. It is Nearer My God to Thee that has established her fame for all time, but her hymn He sendeth sun, He sendeth shower, with its refrain, Father, Thy will, not mine, be done, is typical of a character of singular charm and fervour.

Sarah married William Adams, a scientific man who devised a joint known to every railway engineer, the fishjoint which connects rails so that fast traffic can safely pass over the link. She died from tuberculosis in the year of revolutions, 1848. She was the last of the three to come to this grave.

Harlow, Essex round two

St John is a redundant church now used as an arts and recreation centre. It's a new build that Mee doesn't mention (actually Mee doesn't refer to Harlow New Town at all, even though it was built by 1949 and my edition was published in 1951!). I, surprisingly, rather liked it.

ST JOHN THE BAPTIST, 1839-40. Yellow brick, in the lancet style No aisles with W tower and original STAINED GLASS in the E windows.

After a bit of online detective work I found its entry on the British Listed Buildings website:

1839 Church of stock brick in Flemish bond. Tall nave lower chancel and west tower with taller stairs turret at north east,battlemented. Roofs ridged and gabled with eaves clad with grey slate and leaving raised and stone-coped gables. Style severe Early English with lancets. Chancel buttresses angle type, as those of tower, all gabletted with 2 off-sets. Dentil cornice of headers at eaves. Sill band of stone.

St Andrew is another redundant church in what was the village of Netteswell but which is now subsumed by the New Town. Not reall my cup of tea but the inside sounds interesting.

ST ANDREW. Nave and chancel in one, C13, and C15 belfry. The belfry has four arched bell-openings in a row on each side and a short broach spire. It stands on two posts and a tiebeam with arched braces. The chancel has lancet windows. Other windows are Perp insertions. It is not possible to decide to what work the brick panel in the S wall near the W end can allude which has the arms of Abbot Rose of Waltham who ruled the Abbey from 1497 to 1500. - PULPIT. Incorporating a frieze with a vine pattern, dated 1618. - BENCHES. Two in the nave with plain poppy-heads. - STAINED GLASS. Two small C15 figures in a N window. - PLATE. Cup and Paten of 1641; Almsdish of 1656. - BRASS. Thomas Laurence d. 1522 with wife and children. - Also a brass of 1607.

NETTESWELL. It was given by our last Saxon king to the abbey of Waltham which he loved so well, and there is on the wall of the 700-year-old church a brickwork panel with the emblems of Abbot Rose of Waltham who died in the last year of the 15th century; it shows a double rose between two long-tailed lions, with a crozier and a hare below. In the church is a pair of medieval lancets facing across the nave, with precious old glass in them. One has the angel, lion, ox, and eagle which were the symbols of the writers of the Gospels; the other has three Marys, two fondling little children, and the third a perfect little study of the Madonna in blue and child. It is a gem of 700 years ago.

There is a figure of another Mary standing by an 18th century monument. She was the wife of William Martin, lord of the manor, a most remarkable lady who sleeps in St Margaret’s Westminster. She saw seven sovereigns on our throne and long before she died (at 97) she set up this monument, by which she stands with remarkable portraits of her brother Robert Crosse and his son Thomas.

There are brass portraits of two families of Tudor and Stuart days, one showing Thomas Laurence and his wife and their five children, the other John Bannister with his wife, three sons, and a baby in swaddling clothes. The font at which these children would be christened is 700 years old and still has the staples by which it was locked against witches. On the wall is a mass dial by which the villagers of those days would tell the time.

The church is almost hidden behind a farm, and in finding it we come upon a 16th century barn and a group of fish-ponds.

Flickr.