Greensted Church
— — oak walls older than the chancel they shelter.
Not only on a wall.
“St Andrew's at Greensted is the oldest wooden church still standing in the world. Its nave walls are split oak logs, set vertically into a sill, weathered grey on the outside and a deep honey on the inside. A red-tiled Tudor chancel was added later, and a white weatherboarded tower later still. The lane to the door runs between two yew trees.
Greensted Church, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
St Andrew's, Greensted-juxta-Ongar, stands in a quiet hamlet about a mile west of Chipping Ongar in the Epping Forest district of Essex, roughly 24 miles northeast of central London. The church is built around a Saxon nave of split oak logs set vertically into a timber sill. Dendrochronological testing in the 1990s dated the surviving oak to between roughly 1053 and 1100 CE, revising earlier estimates that placed the structure in the ninth century. A Tudor brick and tile chancel was added in the sixteenth century, and a white weatherboarded west tower around 1820.
The lane to the church runs a quarter-mile off the road from Ongar and ends at a lych-gate under a yew. The churchyard is small and held, with old stones, a low boundary wall, and fields of barley or stubble depending on the season. There is no village, only the church, the rectory, and a farm. The nearest train is at Ongar, the eastern terminus of the abandoned Central line, now a heritage railway. On a weekday afternoon the only sound at the door is wood pigeon and, in summer, the distant Essex tractors.
St Andrew's is an active parish church in the Diocese of Chelmsford, with services most Sunday mornings and a small visitor centre open through the week between Easter and the end of October. There is no admission charge; the parish asks for a donation. The interior is dim, lit through small leaded windows in the north and south walls. Three of the six Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Dorset farm labourers transported to Australia in 1834 for swearing a union oath, settled at Greensted from 1838 after their pardon and worshipped here before emigrating to Ontario in 1844.