60
EPPING FOREST.
from the nearest part of the Forest, the interest
which attaches to this church, both from an anti-
quarian point of view, and for the lover of the
picturesque, perhaps justifies its mention here.
Situated near Ongar, the terminus of the Wood-
ford railway, it is best approached on foot from
that town by a wide and straight grass avenue
about a mile in length, which is terminated by the
red brick gables of Greensted Hall, close to
which the church stands. The structural curiosity
of the church lies in the walls of the nave, which
are built of solid stems of oak-trees set upright,
and tied together by tongues of wood let into
perpendicular grooves at the edges of contact, a
form of construction which, in the opinion of the
learned, supports the belief that this part of the
church dates from the Anglo-Saxon period, and
renders it improbable that any part of it could
have been taken out and renewed. The interior
of the solid wooden wall thus formed has been
brought to a plane surface by the adze, the marks
of which are clearly traceable. Outside, the whole
round sections of the trees are left rough, and
their exposed surfaces are furrowed by the action
of the weather into ridges and deep grooves in the
direction of the grain, but are otherwise uninjured
by the thousand years of exposure which they have
probably endured, except that when the church was
under repair in 1848 their lower ends were found
to be partially decayed, and were cut off and re-
placed by a brick sill. The church is dedicated to
the martyr-king St. Edmund, whose body rested
here for one night, when, more than a hundred
years after his death, it was carried to Bedrickes-
worth, now called Bury St. Edmunds, from London,