The Norwich Road: An East Anglian HighwayHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; Norwich Road
The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is visible on the right, soon
after leaving Ingatestone. Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its
timbered belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the village,
standing solitary, save for the vicarage and a farmhouse, beside a
railway crossing--if, indeed, any building adjoining the main-line of a
great railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret thus honoured
in the place-name is the Saint to whom the church is dedicated. Some
traces of the "marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the old
windows, in decorative allusion, remained until they were swept away
for modern stained-glass in memory of a late vicar and his family;
glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that, save for an
inscription on one of the bells, she now remains unhonoured in her
own church, deposed in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects
kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art furnisher. The only
remaining ancient glass is that of the east window, a magnificent
fifteenth-century "tree of Jesse."
[Illustration: AT MARGARETTING.]
Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the twenty-fifth milestone,
where a post-office and some few scattered cottages straggle
picturesquely at the foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The
odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially to spoil some
two miles of this road is the park wall of Hylands, a large estate
purchased about 1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster, who
stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and raised this eyesore to
enclose his new-made park. Almost as soon as the last brick was put
in its place, the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by railway
speculations, and his walled-in Eden was sold. Nature in the meanwhile
has done her best, and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the
ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River Wid crosses beneath
the road, water-lilies gem the stream and the wind sounds in the
luxuriant Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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