The Essex Churches Site

 

THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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St Mary, Arkesden

Arkesden

Arkesden Arkesden

  Here we are in the hills to the west of Saffron Walden, near to where Essex, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire meet, and the Chilterns come to die. I left Wendens Ambo and was soon on the Royston road and under the M11, the traffic noise rapidly falling away behind me as I turned off and climbed, and climbed, and climbed away from the Cam Valley high along the lonely road to Arkesden.

This is a lovely village, most attractive on its hillside site with a stream running along the high street. It really couldn't be in Suffolk or Norfolk.The churchyard gates and the outer gates were bolted back, the straight path from the village green up to the church looking most inviting. And yet, externally the church is dull, almost all a rebuild of the 1855 by George Pritchett. The new tower replaced the ruin of a round tower which would have been East Anglia's most westerly.

You step inside, however, to an interior of great interest and not a little beauty. The highlights include the spendid memorials, the most striking of which is the garishly painted double bed upon which Richard Cutte and his wife Mary lay down right near the end of the Elizabethan period. Their children, who kneel at their bedside, are all headless. Richard Fox is a 15th Century armoured knight in brass. The best is probably the 1692 memorial to John Withers and his wife, signed by Edward Pearce. It features them in effigy as busts, with a stone frieze of skulls and branches below.

There is a very good 1920s window by William Lawson depicting St Alban, the Blessed Virgin and St Michael. All in all, rather splendid, and while I was inside the sun came out filling it with light and it felt a very pleasant place to be.

Simon Knott, April 2018

                

asleep in the shadows Blessed Virgin flanked by St Alban and St Michael by William Lawson 1929 sower and reaper knight
Arkesden half a person font
G F Bodley's Guild of St Margaret banner St Alban by William Lawson 1929 Mother of God by William Lawson 1929 St Michael by William Lawson 1929 Christ the reaper
Richard and Mary Cutte the househould of the mighty king henrie the 8 and that faint hint of the absurd
Arkesden the Hurrell-Cranmer Epiphany Trust Fund Arkesden
Arkesden

winged skull with crossed bones

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