This is the oldest wooden church in the world and the oldest timber building in Europe. The wooden walls were made of split tree trunks, rammed into the ground, like a palisade. Fifty-one of the original oak ‘planks’ survive. It was probably built about the year 1013 as a resting place for the remains of the martyred King Edmund, and, although the church itself has been altered and adapted over the centuries, the walls of the nave are still the original timbers, charred and weathered with the passage of time. Inside the church, on the cut part of the timber, you can still see the marks of the axes and the adzes.
It’s a miracle, really; the only Saxon timber building still standing, down a lane, in a little clearing in Essex.
