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IF someone were to describe Finchingfield in north Essex, there would be mention of its Norman church, windmill, cosy pubs and neat rows of terraced houses. More? There's the duck pond on the village green and tearooms selling sticky buns. One of Britain's most photographed villages, its image has ended up on tea towels, calendars, postcards, even chocolate boxes.
Go to its north to discover the real beauty of the county of Essex, advises Stephanie Clifford-Smith
September 28, 20099:14pm
IF someone were to describe Finchingfield in north Essex, there would be mention of its Norman church, windmill, cosy pubs and neat rows of terraced houses. More? There's the duck pond on the village green and tearooms selling sticky buns. One of Britain's most photographed villages, its image has ended up on tea towels, calendars, postcards, even chocolate boxes.
When Bill Bryson came over all misty at the thought of leaving Britain in Notes from a Small Island, he wrote about the extraordinarily rich architectural heritage of the country with 445,000 listed buildings and 12,000 medieval churches. Places such as Finchingfield and the surrounding villages contribute in no small way to the tally because this pocket of north Essex was one of the wealthiest parts of Britain until the 18th century. Weaving and cloth production during the Middle Ages flooded the area with money, much of which was spent on stately homes and churches.
But it's not the glorious architecture that springs to many minds at the mention of Essex. Some Britons will snigger and follow up with a crude joke about the locals, including their estuarine accent, a form of cockney from counties near the Thames Estuary. Essex's poor reputation comes from its south, where the arcades in tacky seaside towns such as Southend host local hoods and clones of Vicky Pollard, the bolshie blonde teenager of Little Britain fame. The concrete multistorey car parks and the so-called new towns of Basildon and South Woodham Ferrers, built after World War II to house London workers, haven't done the county any favours either.
A GRUESOME HISTORY THAT'S WORTHY OF A TELEVISION WHODUNIT COGGESHALL has all the makings of a cracking episode of the popular television show Midsomer Murders. The town has a bustling market square, gift and antique shops heady with potpourri, rows of pretty gelato-toned houses and a gruesome history of sinister and violent deaths.
A woman was hanged here in 1699, in one of England's last recorded witch trials. The deaths of hundreds of men, women and children following trials on Market Hill are what many say caused "the curse of Coggeshall", while others put it down to the town's position on the intersection of two ley lines. These lines have no scientific foundation but are believed by the paranormally inclined to be threads of energy that join ancient monuments and the sites of pagan rituals, causing disruptive influences wherever they cross.
Whatever you believe, things turned very nasty here and there was a time in the 1980s when cabbies took fares to the town only reluctantly. The disappearance of 35-year-old Diane Jones in 1983 was the beginning of a wave of incidents that spooked the nation and had the tabloids in a lather. She'd been seen arguing with her husband, Robert, the town doctor, in the pub the night she disappeared. Police questioned him for 55 hours and dug up his garden but finding nothing let him go. Her battered body was found three months later in a forest in Suffolk. No one was charged with the murder.
In 1985, millionaire antique dealer Wilfred Bull shot his wife, Patsy, with an antique musket when she challenged him about his infidelity and demanded a divorce. That same year, at nearby Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Jeremy Bamber killed his adoptive parents, sister and her children to avoid sharing a pound stg. 500,000 inheritance. The following year, when the wife of local farmer and champion clay pigeon shooter Jimmy Bell left him, he shot her, then turned the gun on himself. Then, in 1988, restaurateur Peter Langan doused himself in petrol and set himself alight in the marital bedroom when his wife asked for a divorce.
He died seven weeks later.You won't find any of that in the travel brochures. What you will find are less ghoulish reasons to visit, such as the 16th-century timber-framed house Paycockes, the 15th-century parish church of St Peter ad Vincula and Grange Barn, the oldest surviving timber-framed barn in Europe.
If you want to include Coggeshall on the trip suggested in the main feature, start there before heading east to Finchingfield.
Stephanie Clifford-Smith
Up in its rural north, however, near Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, things are different. Try this road trip, easily achievable in a day. All these places offer accommodation if you want to stretch it out; Essex is a little more than an hour northeast of London and Cambridge is nearby.
Finchingfield: Part of this little town's charm is its topography. The Norman church of St John the Baptist sits at the top of the village surrounded by a graveyard with ancient worn stones and the church tower, with its eight bells, marks the village's high point. A footpath winds up to and around the church from the road, so the building seems to unfold as you approach it obliquely. In the same way, Church Hill, the road in from the east, winds down to the green, past 15th- century houses and the Red Lion pub, one of those low-ceilinged places with a roaring fire.
Most of the plastered buildings are white (it goes so well with the ducks) but the occasional splash of pale blue, baby pink or, on the tearoom doors, an almost fluoro yellow breaks up the palette. Walk up the Causeway heading north and check out the 18th-century timber windmill.
Thaxted: If you've hankered to watch morris men, those wacky dancers in white, strewn with bells, ribbons and flowers, Thaxted could be the place to do it. The Thaxted morris men perform here on weekends throughout the summer, jigging, waving white hankies and rattling their knee bells, generally after a good spell at the local pub. If you miss the dancers you can always wander around the town, which has more big architectural tickets than most places this size. Start in the town centre and amid the rows of well-preserved Georgian shopfronts you'll find a house once occupied by British composer Gustav Holst. This is where he began writing The Planets orchestral suite, much of which has been used in films including Star Wars.
A bit farther along there's the medieval half-timbered Guildhall leaning out into the street from an open courtyard. Begun in 1390, it's still used for meetings and exhibitions. Walk up the hill to the 14th-century church, also called St John the Baptist, which, thanks to its spire, you can see from everywhere. There's a grassy path that takes you past the old almshouses, which look like gingerbread cottages, to John Webb's Windmill (1804). Picnic on the lawn beneath it or visit the museum inside.
Saffron Walden: There are a couple of distinctive characteristics of this small market town: it has never been sacked or burned so there are many well-preserved layers of history on show, especially in its centre. The other feature is that, although, like other towns in the area where wool production brought riches in medieval times, Saffron Walden got another cash injection in the 16th and 17th centuries from a healthy saffron industry. Until that time the place was known as Chipping Walden.
The town centre is predominantly medieval, which means there's a market square, with cheap fruit and vegetables, narrow cobbled streets and half-timbered buildings. If you're wondering why the town hall seems to be in such good condition for a medieval building, it's because it's not one. It was built in that style, presumably to fit in with surrounding structures, but not until 1769 and, being the civic centre, has had money thrown at it since to keep it looking good.
Walk up the hill from the square to visit the 15th-century St Mary the Virgin, the largest parish church in Essex. The lack of good local stone has meant many such buildings were clad in flint and, more commonly in domestic buildings, decorative plaster known as pargetting. North Essex is famous for it. Just across from the church is the Fry Gallery, which represents the Great Bardfield group of artists, Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious among the most prominent. And if you like a maze that's interesting as well as easy to cheat try the turf maze on the common.
Clavering: Pronounced Clay-vering, this little village has become most famous as the place where Jamie Oliver grew up and, while his parents still run the local pub, The Cricketers (which does excellent food), there are other reasons to visit. It's very pretty, very rural and if you love walking it's ideal. The village green, where cricket matches are held throughout summer, looks like a fuzzy felt picture with bright little buildings dotted around its edges. From this open space lead public footpaths that run through Clavering and beyond, tracing timbered forests and open fields.
Continue past the green heading west to find the Norman church of StMary and St Clement. On the way you'll see houses with mossy, steeply pitched roofs and you'll pass through a kissing gate (to keep out livestock). The green blanket of the churchyard with its gravestones and yew trees creates a quiet breathing space as you approach the grey flint-clad building. The nave is spacious, punctuated by columns and monuments. Stand at the front and it's all cool, stone tones but from behind, hand-worked tapestry kneelers lined up along the pew backs introduce splashes of colour...
