About Us

History

Taken, with kind permission, from A Select Guide to Essex Churches And Chapels by members of the Friends of Essex Churches. Edited by Canon John Fitch.

“The church forms an attractive group with the Hall and the old rectory, overlooking to busy A1017 and the spreading village.

Its most impressive feature is its handsome late fifteenth-century west tower. Built in a pleasing misture of rubble, brick and puddingstone with freestone dressings, it has three-light transomed bell openings, a projecting staircase, and a stone parapet with stepped battlements, pinnacles and intermediate figures of angels, and house six bells. This ambitious structure, seen to best advantage from due south, dominates the unpretentious church beneath it. It had evidently been the earlier intention, perhaps due to the awkward lie of the land, to build an equally large tower to serve as an entrance porch, on the south side of the nave, after the fashion of several Suffolk churches around Ipswich. When this was abandoned in favour of a west tower, the unfinished south tower became the porch with a room above it, now the choir vestry, and was completed with a Tudor brick stepped gable.”