Echoes Of Old Mistley

Mistley is easily missed! Just a small railway station on the branch line from Manningtree to Harwich. Or a place passed through on the B1352 road that meanders through the handful of villages that lie between those same two places. A birdwatcher might pause for a while where the road runs beside the muddy Stour Estuary.

In summer the local people gravitate towards the strip of grass between the road and the shore. A couple of ice-cream vans and a tea waggon loiter nearby and people bring deckchairs to sit beneath the trees and gaze out across the water.

We found a few Redshanks and an assortment of gulls as we wandered along, ice-creams in hand. 

You can never be too sure with gulls, but I'll say that those with a small dark patch behind the eye are, confusingly, Black-headed Gulls, while a couple of the larger Herring Gulls lurk at the back.

On reaching the end of the muddy shore we turned briefly inland.

If Mistley is famous for anything, it's these two towers standing in an old graveyard. They are what remains of a church built in 1776 and designed by Robert Adam.

Adam was a leading architect of his day and developed his own style in which many buildings were perfectly symmetrical. So when he was asked to design a church it had to have two towers, rather than the usual one, bookending the nave of the church. When the church was demolished it was decided to keep the towers as they provided a useful landmark for boats negotiating the estuary. That's the village sign in the foreground.

The door to one of the towers was open so we poked our heads inside and peered up at the painted ceiling, which is supposed to represent The Holy Trinity.

The graveyard has many surprising memorials including this odd group of graves, which look like coffins converted into beds! Very strange.

Lichens have conspired to give this plain cross a mystical inscription.

Around the back of the towers (and partly in their shadow) is this Egyptian-style mausoleum. The design was all the rage for just a few years around 1830, though it later came back into fashion when Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered. The material used here is actually polished marble, though the years have not been kind.

I became entranced by the weathered handle and keyhole to the door.

But how come such a prestigious architect was hired to build a church in such an obscure spot? For that we can thank Richard Rigby of Mistley Hall. He had an ambitious plan to turn Mistley, which at that time consisted of a quayside with granaries and malthouses, into a saltwater spa town. Adam was originally supposed to design the spa but it was decided that many other buildings, including the old church, needed to be replaced to be in keeping with the proposed fashionable resort.

One side of the village sign records Mistley's history as a port, when sloops and barges transported wheat, flour and brewers' malt around the coast to London. John Constable's father owned such a vessel. The quay still stands and I was keen to find out if there was any public access to the present-day facilities.

This huge building, dating from about 1896, was part of the old maltings, where top-quality barley was turned into malt for London's brewing industry. It appears to be flats or offices now. At one time there were seven large malthouses in Mistley.

Further along the quayside is an old kiln, also part of the malting industry. This shot was taken with a long lens as a sign warned against proceeding further without a hard hat! You can see that some kind of goods is still stored here.

That lens also came in handy for spotting a seal sunning itself on a sandbank.

On the way back along the High Street we came across The Swan Fountain. Along with the building behind it was designed by Robert Adam as a centrepiece for the planned spa town. Nothing else of the ambitious scheme was completed. Note again the symmetry of Adam's work - it's a wonder that swan doesn't have a head at either end!

Across the fields rises the lofty spire of the Church of St Mary and St Michael, the latest version of Mistley church, dating from around 1870. So there we have it - boats, birds, ice-cream, stylish Georgian towers, peculiar graves, a village sign, dockside kilns and malthouses, a sunbathing seal, a decorative fountain and a church. And looking at the map of listed buildings in the area I can see there's plenty more that I missed in Mistley!

Take care.