18th January 2026 Puddingstone

 A WIP or a work in progress.  Chasing puddingstones.  You will see from the walls that these churches used up every bit of stone and Roman tiling in the area.  Then patterned the walls with supporting puddingstone.  Flint is of course also used as is plaster and lathe, giving rise to pargetting as an art form.

And why Puddingstone? because the pebbles in the dark matrix looked like a pudding, Christmas maybe!

There is hardly any stone in Essex, so every scrap that could be found to build a wall was used.  Interestingly brick was also used from as far back as the Romans, that is why you see the reinforcing edges of churches where Roman brick is used and later on brick that came over as ballast was used  from the Netherland.

Ingatestone (I think)

Fairstead Church.  P/S, Roman tile and flint
to be found here

Ingatestone Church.  The puddingstone is layered with Roman tile.

Broomfield Church. Was the stone already in situ and incorporated into the foundations?

Well we did this church in 2008. Paul has as always written it up beautifully.  

I love the paragraph out of the church pamphlet....

“The Roman tiles are a reminder of the story still related fifty years ago. The plan had originally been to build the church at the top of New Barn Lane, called Dragon’s Foot in the tithe maps, there is a depression, now somewhat ploughed out but still deep enough to be a dragon’s footprint. This was the site of a Roman building which still yields numerous hypocaust tiles and bricks, so the story is a delightfully muddled memory of the Saxons trundling cartloads of Roman bricks down to the Green on the orders of their new Norman masters to use as quoins since there were no local stone quarries.”

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St.Botolph's Pudding stone  ??? at Beauchamp Roding It hardly looks like a pudding stone but it is referenced as a pudding stone on the Megalithic Portal.

The Ugley Green puddingstone

The 2011 blog on this is here

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Saint Mary, the virgin. Great Leighs.  Look at that Norman doorway has someone cleaned it? 

Also, have just stumbled on Beeleigh Abbey, which is situated next to the River Chelmer and the original building is still intact. Also we once walked all this way along the river to Beeleigh but never found the abbey, all I remember is the beautiful demoiselles dragonflies skimming over the water.

Beeleigh Abbey