Made in Essex
A walk around Audley End uncovers the ghosts of communities past
Ghostly reminders of lost country estates beguile Fiona Reynolds on a walk around Audley End
These signs of past prosperity could, we speculate, indicate an Austen-like social structure
ILIKE nothing better than watching the landscape from a train, knowing that under the surface of the countryside flashing by lurks a fascinating history. To find it, you only have to get out and walk.
Today, in the depths of midwinter, it’s the turn of a quiet corner of north Essex. We leave the train at Audley End and follow enticing signs to the great house. Initially we’re disappointed, as we’re directed along a mile of busy main road (note to English Heritage: please can you put a footpath inside the estate wall), but our bad experience doesn’t last as we’re greeted by a view of breathtaking beauty.
Audley End House, which was once a staggering four times the size it is today, towers over the landscape, windows sparkling in the winter sunshine. The children’s steam train seems at least as popular as the house, but no one could fail to be impressed by the perfect symmetry of its delicate stonework mirrored in the still chill of the lake.
In any history of the National Trust, this spectacular Jacobean palace is one that got away. The 9th Lord Braybrooke inherited it in 1943, following the death of two cousins. With a double set of death duties and no wish to live there, he was at his wits’ end—there was no money for an endowment and his trustees refused to let him give the house away.
With James Lees-milne’s help, Braybrooke wanted to set up a deal with the National Trust, but a succession of potential tenants and a joint scheme with Cambridge University for extramural studies fell through. Fortunately, the Ministry of Works was angling for a grand house and, eventually, with the Trust’s support, managed to persuade the then Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, to acquire it for the nation.
Today, Audley End is one of English Heritage’s treasures. We have no time to visit, however, and pass the house with lingering glances, heading south along Beechy Ride, a lovely green way running beside a bubbling stream that’s now part of the Harcamlow Way. Large, intensively farmed fields give a sense of agricultural prosperity and, here, the historic landscape reveals itself as well.
To our right is a small estate, Shortgrove Hall, whose grounds were landscaped by Capability Brown in the 1750s. It, too, once had a grand house, built in the late 17th century by a London merchant, Giles Dent, but it was demolished after a fire in 1966.
Soon, there’s another. At a footpath junction, we follow Debden Water eastwards, now walking in a much more intimate countryside of pasture and marshland that leads into Debden Park, with its landscaped lake and glorious, if rundown, old farm buildings. The house here was also demolished, in the 1930s, but we can almost feel its ghost hovering near us.
Keen to avoid roads, we navigate around it, from Brickhouse Farm to Debden Hall farmhouse, Cabbage Wood and Waldegraves —delightful names in delightful rolling, wooded countryside.
Intrigued by these signs of past prosperity that could, we speculate, indicate an Austenlike social structure, we look at the map and see that, all around, are halls and parks, some with their houses in new uses, some still occupied and some mere whispers of a past in which these estates, their people and their livelihoods made up the social and economic fabric of rural life.
From Waldegraves, it’s an easy walk into Newport, with its stuccoed painted houses, a charming high street and evidence that today’s society includes commuters whose hinterland is the city as well as the local countryside. We walk back across the fields to Audley End station as dusk descends, thinking about how the internet, fast travel and modern life can so easily detach us from texture and detail in the landscape.
Although it’s wonderful that spectacular places such as Audley End House survive so successfully for visitors, it’s only by walking that you can really immerse yourself in the places and stories of the past. Fiona Reynolds is Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the author of ‘The Fight for Beauty’ Follow her on Twitter @fionacreynolds