St Andrew's Church, Greensted

The overnight presence of a saint’s holy body here adds pilgrim credentials to a unique relic of rustic Saxon architecture, a starting point for the St Peter’s Way

Highlights

• World’s oldest wooden church
• Resting place of St Edmund king and martyr

This humble little church is the only link of its kind with early Christianity. Not merely in Essex, but in the world. There are countless English churches built on the site of a wooden Saxon chapel. Their guides will invariably tell you that 'no trace can be seen' of the original building. This is the one exception.

At Greensted you can actually see and feel the house of God as the first English Christians knew it. The walls of the nave are an amazing relic of architecture, faith and technology from the Saxon era. Built from oak tree trunks solid enough to last a millennium, it is easily the oldest wooden church in the world, as well as the oldest wooden building in Europe. (A Buddhist pagoda from 7th-century Japan takes the overall world title, incidentally.)

The hard black walls of the nave, worn smooth by the passing of centuries, have echoed with the voices of a Christian community each Sunday for the past 1,000 years. And the huge oaks themselves would have been around 1,000 years old when they were felled. They might have been acorns and saplings at the time Jesus was born.

If the age and wood are not enough to bestow holiness, the site of the church is also connected to England’s first patron saint. The body of St. Edmund king and martyr rested in Greensted for one night in 1013 during his translation to Bury St. Edmunds.

The timber was once thought to date from 845, but more recent opinion reckons 1053. A few consider it even later than that, a Norman building, but that seems highly unlikely. Apart from anything else, there is a very large and solid-looking flint church less than a mile away at Chipping Ongar, built in 1080.

The Normans preferred to make a statement with their new buildings, and the technology used to build St. Andrew’s dates from an earlier age. Huge trunks of oak were split down the middle and placed side by side, the cut surface forming a flat wall inside. Known as a palisade church, only the walls of the nave remain from the original structure. Much has been added and modified at Greensted’s church during a millennium of worship – but the heart of oak continues to beat.

Directions

St Andrew’s Church, Church Lane, off Greensted Road, Greensted CM5 9LD

www.greenstedchurch.org.uk

W3W: unit.meals.preoccupied

GPS: 51.7044N 0.2255E

The church is a mile west of Chipping Ongar. Head south through town on the A128, and turn right along The Borough, which becomes Greensted Road. This winds for just under a mile through the countryside to the church, signed on your right down Church Lane. Open daily.