Few cyclists know how old-world the neglected county of Essex really is. So unknown is this part of eastern England that its ill-earned reputation for flatness and want of interest has lasted since the first guide-book writer made the initial mis-statement until the present day. A great gulf separates the West-Ender and the Central Londoner from Essex; a gulf filled with crowded streets and rendered dangerous to the cyclist by the granite setts and tram-lines that characterise the main roads leading from Whitechapel to Bow, Stratford, Ilford, and Romford, beyond which last town only can the country be said to commence. Nor do railways afford so ready a means of intercourse between east and west as could be desired. For the sake, however, of seeing what kind of country this may be, let us, greatly daring, get on to the Great Eastern Railway at Liverpool Street, and take train to Chadwell Heath, following the course indicated by the sketch map. This gives a run of a little over twenty miles, and shows Essex in its most characteristic vein.

Gaining the main road to Romford from Chadwell Heath Station, we follow it for three-quarters of a mile, turning off to the left where a sign-post points the way to Havering-atte-Bower, along a good-surfaced, sandy lane. Here we come immediately to pretty, pastoral country, with spreading views in every direction across the many-patterned fields. Away, four miles to the left, on its striking hillside, is Claybury, the towers of its asylum rubricated in the warm glow of the afternoon sun until they take on a glory like that of a New Jerusalem. Along the road one comes to an old red brick barn, and then to the first of the many old Essex wooden windmills. A gentle rise leads up to the small hamlet of Collier Row, and thence the road goes uphill all the way to Havering, turning to the left at a point duly sign-posted. This is the first taste of the Essex hills. Notice, as you ascend, a red brick house in a park on the right hand. This is the so-called Bower House, the comparatively modern successor of the palace built by Edward the Confessor. Here, in the surrounding park, it was, according to the tradition, that the saintly king, disturbed in his orisons by the song of the nightingales, prayed that they might never sing again at Havering; and so it is (quite incorrectly) said that, even now, the nightingale is a stranger to the surrounding woods. The legend, true or not, does not raise our opinion of the Confessor. Does not the poet finely say, "He prayeth best who loveth best all things, both great and small"?

Although Havering has a long, long history as a royal domain and as the dower-house of queens, little or nothing is left to show the tourist its former importance. A few mounds near the rebuilt and uninteresting church alone bespeak the site of the palace.

As you come up the hill to the tiny village and turn to the left by an ancient elm, whose hollow trunk has been bricked up to help preserve it, notice the old stocks on the green, designed for the accommodation of two. Down a gently sloping road, take the first turning to the right after passing the entrance to Pyrgo Park, and then the first to the right again and past a red brick chapel. Two miles and a half along a pleasant, sandy lane, and then the way divides left and right, beside a pond. Across a broad common, away to the right, are seen the houses of Navestock village; but the church lies half a mile onward, down the left-hand road. This is one of the most curious and one of the most prettily situated churches in Essex, standing on a hilltop and surmounted by groups of graceful wych elms, with the waters of a broad lake, belonging to an adjoining park, seen beyond. Essex is a county entirely devoid of building-stone, and this fact very largely influenced the building of its ancient churches, erected as they were in times when to bring stone from great distances was practically impossible. Flint, being found locally, was often made use of; but the county having practically been one vast forest, timber was the readiest building material, and so we find wood entering largely into the construction of many Essex churches. That of Navestock is an instance, and here it is the tower that is timbered. Massive oak beams form the framing, and are as perfect now as they were when originally erected, over four hundred years ago. The white-painted, weather-boarded exterior is, of course, more recent. The whole is surmounted by a slender shingled spire, and the effect is remarkably like that of a Norwegian church. Patched and altered by many succeeding generations since its first Norman and Early English days, the body of the building is of many styles; and it is plain to see, from the fragments of Norman mouldings and the blocked-up Early English lancets, how utterly without reverence were the old men for the work of their forebears. In the Decorated and Perpendicular periods they inserted the lovely traceried windows whose mouldering mullions yet remain, and in order to do so they cut away without the slightest compunction the narrow slits of the Norman window-openings that merely rendered the darkness of the interior more apparent, and did the same by the larger but still inadequate Early English lights. Inadequate, that is to say, for lighting the building; and it was just for this practical purpose that the men of later periods ruthlessly swept the original work away. That their own work was in the highest degree artistic is but an accident; but this should afford no excuse to the purists among restorers, who have wrought the most widespread havoc in old churches like this by “restoring” buildings to the one uniform style in which they were originally built, and tearing down the traces of all the intervening periods, which, besides being worthy of preservation for their artistry, are really an integral part of the history of such old structures. It is to be hoped that the restorer will not be allowed to wreak his will upon Navestock Church.

Retracing our course from here, and going up the road by which we came, the way to Kelvedon Hatch—or Kelvedon Common, as it is sometimes called—lies up a steep and stony, but happily short, rise, succeeded by one of those prettily-wooded winding lanes so characteristic of Essex, with sunlit peeps between the trees of sloping fields, golden-yellow with waving corn. Very much has been heard of late years of agricultural depression in Essex, and of the impossibility of growing wheat at a profit anywhere in England; but they either achieve the impossible here, or else (a thing inconceivable in a farmer) they grow wheat for the mere pleasure of seeing it grow. As a matter of fact, there is probably more wheat grown in Essex to-day than in any other county of its size.

In one mile, take a turning to the right, then the first to the left, and then the next two turnings to the right again, bringing the explorer to the scattered village of Kelvedon Hatch, a thoroughly Essex village, with the weather-boarded cottages and projecting red brick chimney-breasts you will find scarce anywhere else than in this county. Make straight through the long, flat village street, and then to the left, where a sign-post marks the way to Blackmore. In something like half a mile down this turning, notice the old stocks at “Stocks Corner,” where a sign-post points right for Doddinghurst. Do not turn here, but continue ahead until a post is observed indicating the road to Blackmore to be down a turning to the left. In about two miles from here, when you have been wheeling along a country lane until Blackmore appears to be unattainable, and you have almost given up all hopes of finding it, the spire of the village church is glimpsed across the meadows to the right, and a pretty and easy run leads into the street of this exceedingly beautiful and old-world place.

At Navestock we saw one of the Essex timbered belfries, but at Blackmore we discover the finest example in the county, three-staged, and a very forest of timbering within. A fine old red brick mansion facing the churchyard is known as “Jericho,” and, although its appearance was greatly altered in the time of Queen Anne, really dates back to the days of Henry the Eighth, whose secret retreat it was. Here that Sultan carried on an intrigue with Lady Elizabeth Talbois, who gave birth in 1519 to a son, named Henry Fitzroy, created by his royal father Duke of Richmond and Somerset. Had that son lived, we should doubtless have possessed one more great peerage, left-handedly descended from Royalty, to keep company with those of the Duke of St. Albans, the Duke of Grafton, the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Munster, and others. But he died, in his seventeenth year, in 1536.

The Court was pretty accurately informed of the King’s whereabouts on those occasions when he secretly visited Blackmore, and whispered that he had “gone to Jericho.” There is, indeed, little doubt of that well-known phrase having originated in this manner. A stream running through the village is still called the Jordan.

Leaving Blackmore for the twin villages of Willingale Spain and Willingale Doe, cross the road at Blackmore, and, turning to the left, pursue a level course along a country road until reaching a solitary fork, which, of course, being solitary and puzzling, has no sign-post.

The right-hand fork looks the most likely, but it is the left, as a matter of fact, that should be taken. This leads past a hamlet where the sign-post vouchsafes a whole gazetteer-full of information; after which, in half a mile, turn to the right (the left turning lands you in a farmyard, and into a duck-pond, very green and slimy). Then a horribly loose, dusty, and stony stretch for a mile, and, turning left, the two churches of Willingale Spain and Willingale Doe are seen, standing in one churchyard. An absurd legend tells how they were built by two sisters who could not agree as to the style of a church they had proposed to build between them. One losing patience and saying that she would build a church of her own, the other is supposed to have answered, “If you’re willing, girl, do!” History, however, disproves this ridiculous story and tells us that Willingale Doe obtained its second name from the old lords of the manor, the family of D’Ou.

There is a curious epitaph in Willingale Spain churchyard to one Charles Davis, who was killed in his thirty-eighth year "by a fall from the elm tree near which he is buried," as the inscription says. He lies, indeed, under the shadow of it.

But this is not the only thing worth note, for, just within the little doorway that leads into the chancel of Willingale Spain Church, may be noticed on the floor a curious monumental brass to Isaac Kello, who died, aged nine years, in 1614, “son to Mr. Bartholomew Kello, Minister of Christ’s Evangell”—

It is not very easy to discover precisely what Mr. Bartholomew Kello, who presumably wrote this, meant by it, but its general tone sounds pathetic enough.

From here a winding lane leads to Fyfield, whose rector has earned some notice by holding cyclists’ parades and by entertaining passing wheelmen. Thence to Chipping Ongar it is an excellent road. From here it will be convenient to take train back to London; first, however, paying a visit to Greenstead Church, a short distance beyond the town, to the right of the road. It lies at the end of a long avenue, and is remarkable for the walls of its nave being constructed of the trunks of oak trees, set upright. The exterior still exhibits the rude rounded surface of the original trunks, worn and furrowed by time; while the adze-marks by which the inner sides have been planed down to something like a flat surface are still visible, although the work dates back to Saxon times. When the church was restored in 1848 the decayed lower portions of these trunks were cut off—five inches of those forming the south wall, and one inch from those on the north side—and the rest preserved by being placed on a brick sill built to the ground level. At the same time the logs were tongued together with strips of oak to prevent dampness penetrating to the church.

The chancel is of late Perpendicular date, and is of red brick; but the body of the church remains an eloquent survival of the ancient steading in a clearing of the green woods that once spread densely over old-world Essex.

The church is dedicated to that most famous of all East Anglian saints, St. Edmund the King and Martyr, who was seized by the Danes in the year 871 at Hoxne, and on his refusing to renounce Christianity, bound by them to an oak, and shot to death with arrows. And not only is it so dedicated, but it owes its very existence, in a curious way, to him; having been originally built as a temporary shrine of logs for his body to lie in on the journey, when it was transferred to London from its gorgeous shrine at Bury St. Edmunds during the troubled years immediately preceding the Conquest. A fragment of stained glass, with a crowned head pictured on it, is let into a little window in the weather-boarded tower, and a portion of the ancient Hoxne oak is preserved at the Rectory, where there is an old painting representing him. It is a singular coincidence that the oak—St. Edmund’s Oak, as it was named—fell at the very time in 1848 when the little church was being restored. The absolute truth of the legend was proved by an ancient arrowhead being discovered almost in the heart of the famous tree.