Cycle Rides Round London

by Charles G. Harper

THE STOCKS, HAVERING-ATTE-BOWER.

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.

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.