HIGHLIGHT: The Hertfordshire countryside
High on this Essex prairie is Ugley Hall Farm, a little island of human habitation in an ocean of spring green. Behind the great metal barns I can just make out the brick tower of Ugley’s church, St Peter’s.
The cows are in the dairy as I pass through the farmyard, but their lowing gives way to the cry of young lambs as I emerge on the other side, pass their nursery field and turn into the churchyard. The sheep suckling lambs in the field are echoed on the church notice board, where on a poster two lambs – looking a little more photogenic without the red numbers sprayed on their flanks – pose beneath the headline: ‘I am the good shepherd’
St Peter’s, with its 13th century rough-flint nave and great buttressed Tudor brick tower – like a sunburned face above a pale torso – epitomises the romance of the isolated country church.
I follow a rural route from Ugley, via Widdington and Newport to Audley End. On the approach to what is now a grand country house I pick up Beechy Ride, an ancient green way that takes me to Abbey Farm, once the farm to Walden Abbey, the Benedictine monastery that stood where Audley End House is now.
The abbey was dissolved and sold by Henry VIII to his Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Audley, but its end did not come under the Suppression of Religious Houses Acts of 1536 and 1539. Rather, it was forfeited when the abbot revealed to Thomas Cromwell that he had secretly married. The abbot argued that ‘though he might not do it by the laws of men, he might do it lawfully by the laws of God for avoiding of more inconvenience’. Cromwell disagreed, and that was the end of that.
Audley End House was built between 1605 and 1614 by Thomas Howard, Audley’s grandson, for £200,000 (£62m today). It was one of the finest Jacobean houses in England: a palace in all but name. Even today, reduced to a third of its original size, it is still imposing.
But it was built on the bones of Walden Abbey. In 1979, excavations showed that the walls of the inner court of the Jacobean house were built on the foundations of the monastic cloister. More of the abbey is thought to lie beneath the eastern lawn and flowerbeds, where Capability Brown later laid out the sumptuous parkland in which the house sits.
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