THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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St Mary, Strethall

Click on the 'play' symbol in the second image to see all my photographs of this church as a slide show, then click on any image in the slideshow to see it large in a new page. Alternatively, if you don't have flash enabled, you can go straight to the set for this church on flickr. Now, imagine this - a two mile long road that warns you "narrow road with no passing places" set between high hedged banks. It is dead straight, an old Roman Road, but you can't see far ahead because it is coming down a rolling hill and then up again, with occasional distant views out across south Cambridgeshire (I could just make out Duxford hangar 8 miles off at one point). Not a house in sight, until you turn off onto an even smaller lane down towards a dead end where you reach an 18th Century farm that still has real cows - yes, a surviving dairy farm in East Anglia! On the edge of the farmyard is a bluff looking out over the valley, and on this stands a perfect little Saxon church, always open, well kept, with a fantastic Saxon chancel arch and tower arch (Pevsner thought it one of the best Saxon survivals in England). And there is a late medieval brass of a priest, and other brasses, and a grand Norman font. This is what churchcrawling is all about. This is what England is all about. Simon Knott, May 2012

 

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home - index - latest - e-mail
links - small print - about this site
Norfolk churches - Suffolk churches
www.simonknott.co.uk