Near the start of the walk in Chipping Ongar is a wooded mound, all that remains of a castle built by Edward de Luci, one of the knights involved in the murder of Thomas Becket. Ongar's most famous building, however, is the United Reformed Church with its 18th-century archway entrance. In the room above, David Livingstone wrote to the London Missionary Society asking if he could go to Africa, and buried in the chapel is Jane Taylor, who wrote Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. South of the parish church is the tomb of Edward Boodle, who founded Boodle's, the St James's club.
You leave the town along the Avenue (so called because it was once lined with elms), with a view north to the white-painted 18th-century Blake Hall, home of the Capel Cure family (at the end is Elizabethan Greensted Hall). This straight path forms part of the Essex Way, linking Epping with Harwich 81 miles away on the county's North Sea coast.
Greensted Church is one of the most famous and oldest in the country; the nave walls, built of split logs, were erected by the Saxons in AD 845, while the chancel arch is Norman and the priest's door is Tudor. It was in this tiny building that the body of St Edmund the Martyr rested on its way to Bury St Edmunds.
James Brine, the Tolpuddle Martyr, married the daughter of fellow martyr Thomas Stanfield here in 1839 after their pardon and return from Australia. The vicar, who still denounced them as convicts, is buried in the tomb surrounded by railings. The church — which featured on a stamp in 1972 — is well known for its biennial herb festival, and herb recipes and remedy leaflets are always readily available.
Greensted, which is little more than a farm, hall, and church, has changed little since the Tolpuddle Martyrs walked between the church and their own farm at nearby Greensted Green at the end of a green lane. The 400-year-old farmhouse is now known as Tudor Cottage and is marked by a plaque recalling the martyrs who lived there from 1838 until 1844 (opposition by the vicar to the Chartists holding meetings in the barn led to their emigration to Canada).
Beyond the railway built in 1865, winding Penson's Lane affords another view of the Blake Hall mansion. Occasionally, deer appear from Ongar Park Wood to the west. In the open field here and along Cripsey Brook below Ackingford Bridge, butterflies and dragonflies are often found, and kingfishers are also seen by the water. The stream, which once powered a mill, rises at North Weald Bassett — one stop down the line from Ongar — and joins the River Roding on the far side of the town.
After crossing the line, the path goes over fields with a view of St Martin's Church spire rising above Chipping Ongar, which sits clustered around its castle mound. Soon you are back on the Avenue on the way back to the start of the walk.
