Pretty Villages in North Essex
Our district is blessed with quietly attractive countryside, winding leafy lanes and picturesque villages with historic period buildings, thatched cottages, village greens, traditional welcoming pubs, coaching inns and unique parish churches.
The Colne Valley has numerous picturesque villages, unforgettable vistas of typical English countryside and fragments of ancient wooland dotted along the valley sides.
Almost a textbook example of the traditional English village, Finchingfield is described as the ‘most photographed village in England,' The combination of duck pond, village green, humpbacked bridge and pub, overlooked by colour-washed cottages, a windmill and a medieval church, give it an unbeatable series of views.
The layout of the streets and wonderfully varied houses and cottages make Great Bardfield a place of enormous charm and was why its the favoured home of renowned artists such as Edward Bawden, John Aldridge and Eric Ravilous.
Frank Crittall, the owner of a company that made metal-framed windows, built Silver End in 1926 for his employees. The village was designed to be completely self-sufficient with its own water supply and drainage, shops, schools and churches. It remains a nationally important village of ‘modern movement' architecture.
Castle Hedingham is a pretty little village with many teashops and attractive houses is dominated by a magnificent Norman keep, the finest and best preserved in England. Situated at the very North of our district, the river Stour weaves in and out of our district. One of England's greatest landscape painters John Constable painted many of his most famous paintings in the valley. Much of the Stour Valley, rich in wheat, pastureland and fine trees, is designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Borley is situated in the north of our district on the borders of Suffolk. This small village made world news in 1929, when tales of ghosts at Borley Rectory were told in the ‘Daily Mirror'
The Belchamps are three of the smallest and most picturesque villages in North Essex. Belchamp is a Norman deviation of the Anglo Saxon word meaning timber-framed homestead.
