Little England’s larger legacy

England can feel at its most insular the closer you get to the coast (which also means the continent). In Devon I've heard comically old-fashioned xenophobia (“we don't want those Frenchies here,” and so on). In Kent the xenophobia can be a touch less comical, shading into the racist politics of the British National Party and the English Defence League. The coastal fringes of Essex – where I went the other day on a tour of local churches, inspired by the excellent new AA illustrated book Exploring Britain’s Churches and Chapels, and guided most expertly by the architectural historian James Bettley – are something else again, a kind of island within an island, seemingly marooned in a long gone era (the 1950s?) as well as a strange liminal place.

Coastal Essex has some of the oldest and oddest churches in Britain. None is older or odder than St Peter-on-the-Wall, Bradwell-on-Sea, a building resembling a tall stone barn standing entirely on its own, apart from an insignificant cottage, quite in the middle of nowhere, separated by two or three hundred metres of salt-marsh from the wind-whipped grey-brown waters of the North Sea, looking across to Holland.

If the church looks like a barn, that is not surprising because it served as a barn for several centuries. Before that, though, it was a church for nearly 1,000 years; the centre of a community, a kind of secular monastery; and before that, the materials used to make it were part of the Roman fort of Othona, built to protect Britannia from the marauding Saxons in the 4th century AD. Inside it is plain, lit from high windows, with a crucifix and a simple stone altar. The plainness and simplicity are infinitely more evocative here in this bleak exposed place than any amount of highly wrought decoration.

St Mary's, Mundon, another coastal Essex church, is also remote and beautiful. Its main glory – in this part of England without much stone – is woodwork: the beautiful timber-framed 16th century tower, the 18th century box pews, pulpit and rood-screen that survived miraculously as the place fell into disuse after becoming redundant in 1970. Fortunately a splendid organisation called the Friends of Friendless Churches, one of several volunteer bodies that protect British churches under the umbrella of the National Churches Trust, saved this lovely modest church – I cannot imagine a more romantic spot to get married.

Simplicity: St Peter-on-the-Wall, Bradwell-on-Sea

Quite different but equally idiosyncratic is the substantial and in parts lavishly decorated town church of All Saints, Maldon. The oddity here is the 13th century triangular tower, the only one in England (if anyone knows of triangular towers elsewhere, please email). The greatest treasure is the unexpected, richly decorated stonework in the south aisle, especially the slender rose-shoots carved above the windows.

If you asked me why I like trawling round these antiquated buildings (some being put to surprisingly modern uses, serving as post offices and shops), I would say it was in the spirit of the poet Philip Larkin, as captured in his ambiguously titled poem “Church Going”; as an unbeliever, obstinately drawn to these places where human beings gathered for so long, through the turbulence of history, to help give some collective meaning to the hard constants of the human condition.

Churches are also a way of navigating, a series of beacons to guide you round parts of your country, and your history, you might not otherwise have explored. I might not be a practising Christian but I am moved by the evidence of Christendom, as a shared culture and set of beliefs and practices transcending mercantile materialism, which made this misty island for so long part of a larger whole.

The euro project might have been flawed from the start, as Jacques Delors said recently, but the wider European project of fostering community spirit in a continent torn by appalling wars surely has much to commend it and has been largely successful. Our British churches remind us that though Britain might have been an island for the past 8,000 years or so, it has also always, as John Donne put it, been part of the continent, part of the main. Mean-spirited little Englanders, take note.

harry.eyres@ft.com

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