All Saints Church Feering and walk

Several times a year I join a group of ex-work colleagues for a walk. The members of the group each take it in turn to decide where the walk should be, plan the route, and very importantly organise the lunch stop at the end of the walk.

A walk that we undertook in late October was around the village of Feering. It was quite a damp day, in fact by the end of the walk when we were sitting in the pub the rain was coming down quite heavily, but in many ways that added to the atmosphere, the changing of the seasons, the autumnal colours, the feeling of the days drawing in.

We met on the road out side the The Bell pub which is next to village church of All Saints . This was to be the start and end of the walk.

Our walk took us through the village, and then into a small area of woodland, which had an excellent boardwalk to walk along. The boardwalk followed the route of a small stream for some way, which was very pleasant. We crossed the main Kelvedon Road, (turn left at this point and we could have gone to Perrywood Garden Centre for some retail therapy and lunch). Instead we took a lane which led us through to open fields. Our route then skirted the edges of fields and twice took us across farm bridges over the A12. This was a circular walk, so one bridge took us across the road on the way out, whilst the second was on the return half of the walk taking us back to Feering village.

On our return to the village we were able to visit the church. I love churches and this was one that I’d never been inside before. I particularly liked the brick porch, which was added in about 1500. Inside there is a copy of the altar painting The Ascension of Christ by John Constable, the original is in St. Mary the Virgin Church in Dedham. There’s also a rather impressive parish chest, I always like to imagine all the important parish documents that may be stored in these chests over hundreds of years.

After our visit to the church we then went to the Bell for our lunch. The pub was busy – it was a Friday lunch time, but we were served quickly by a friendly member of staff. We chose a selection of meals including soup, sandwiches, quiche and baked potato’s, all of which were very healthy, and then we let ourselves down by having puddings, well it was cold wet day by that time!

If you would like to follow all or part of this walk have a look at the Kelvedon Parish Council website, where there is downloadable leaflet for the route. The walk is described as Focus on Feering . There’s a range of different walks on the site for the area around the two villages of Kelvedon and Feering.