Borley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Borley is a village and civil parish in Essex, England. It is located on the River Stour, approximately 3 km (2 miles) northwest of Sudbury, Suffolk and is 39km (24 miles) north-northeast from the county town of Chelmsford. The village is in the district of Braintree and in the parliamentary constituency of Saffron Walden. The parish is part of the Stour Valley South parish cluster.[1] It consists of two hamlets, Borley around the church, and Borley Green, to the east.
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[edit] Landmarks
There are some old buildings, including Borley Hall, the fragment of a much larger house and Borley Place, one-time the rectory. The church (dedication unknown) is a small building of stone originally in the Romanesque/ Early English style of the late 12th and early 13th centuries. It has been altered over the years so now it is in the mainly perpendicular style of the mid 14th to 16th centuries. consisting of chancel, nave, south porch and embattled western tower, containing bells, and contains many tombs of the Waldegrave family, including a monument 14 feet high, with a cornice supported by six pillars of the Corinthian order, beneath which lie full length figures of Sir Edward Waldegrave, who was knighted in 1553, at the coronation of Queen Mary, and who died in 1599 and Lady Frances (Neville) his wife, who died in 1599; with a marginal inscription in Latin and a record of other alliances of this family; in the chancel is a brass to John Durham of Norfolk, ob. 1601.
Borley is most famous for the survival of a document from 1308 listing the 'Extent' of the manor, listing the main occupants, and the rental income.
[edit] Borley Rectory
It is notorious too for the 'Borley Rectory Affair' which was supposedly the haunting of the rectory by a nun and a former rector Harry Bull. The press and a psychical researcher called Harry Price managed to generate a story in 1929 which captured the attention of the nation and convinced many of the proof of the permanence of the spirit after death. After Harry Price's death, the story began to unravel under the scrutiny of experts from the Society for Psychical Research, who went through the records with great tenacity, suspecting that Harry Price had deliberately enhanced evidence to sensationalise events, and suggest a supernatural causation. Any possible evidence of ghosts was irredeemably contaminated by Harry Price's behaviour and the manipulation of the facts in his two books, 'The Most Haunted House In England' and 'The End Of Borley Rectory', produced during and immediately after the war. However much of the phenomena occurred before Price was called to the scene and villagers reported much activity during the periods when Price was not present.
The place still attracts 'psychic tourists' who believe that the ghostly nun will one day re-appear.
[edit] References
- ^ Parish cluster map (JPG). www.braintree.gov.uk. Retrieved on 2007-02-01.
