TOM KING discovers that former punk rocker Andrew Barham now spends his time in church

A saga of many years duration reached its culmination this month when 36-year-old Andrew Barham handed over the manuscript of his first book to publisher Ian Henry.

This book, The Lost Parish Churches of Essex, is the culmination of a mighty quest.

While there are those of us who quiver with passion at the mere phrase 'parish church,' the subject matter may not be everybody's cup of vicarage tea.

The story of the book's making is a different matter. It is mass market stuff. Who could fail to thrill to this tale of thousands of miles of travel to strange places, the pursuit of mysterious legends, brushes with death, and the unearthing of a whole new field of knowledge?

Andrew Barham has individualist written all over him. He says that he used to be a Punk rocker, and he now keeps his hair tied in a pony-tail because "it's not really worth the time and effort to keep it under control."

It's hard to imagine someone like this living a tame suburban existence, and in his pursuit of the lost churches, he has clearly found a fast track to adventure.

Before Andy embarked on his account of the lost churches, nobody even knew that the subject existed. A church is a resilient thing.

A church doesn't just disappear forever like some minicab office. The bulk of our church sites are over 1,000 years old. Churches remain the centre of communities. If they burn or fall down, they are rebuilt. They stay put.

Yet here and there Andy began to pick up whiffs of churches which hadn't made it through the second Christian millennium.

The earliest was Thunderley (not to be confused with Thundersley), which disappeared in 1425 with an excellent excuse - the Black Death had wiped out the vicar and congregation.

At the other end of the time-scale we have Pitsea church, whose every last lingering death throe has been recorded in the Echo; and Dunton, transformed into a desirable private residence.

In between, there are numerous churches that just disappeared, leaving behind an aroma of mystery.

Like restless spirits, the lost churches have been calling for someone to tell their story, and it was Andrew Barham who heard the call. "Someone had to do it," he says, simply.

Andrew, who lives in Ramsden Heath, has worked with Customs and Excise at Southend "man and boy."

He now works there four days a week, and devotes much of the remaining time to his hobby, although that innocent word, with its connotations of making models of Nelson's Column out of toothpicks, scarcely does justice to the scale of his involvement.

Since his first lesson in the subject at school (Deanes, Thundersley) "it's always been history that lay at the centre of my interests," Andy explains.

This developed into a specific interest in historic buildings and sites, and from there into a specialist interest in parish churches.

"I'm not a churchgoer," says Andrew, "but I probably spend more time in churches than people who worship in them every Sunday."

With his writer wife Andrea he embarked on a church-bagging project: "We would plot out a route and visit and photograph on average about 12 churches over the course of a Saturday.

"There are 415 churches in Essex - we ticked them off as we visited them. It got us out of the house and we saw all sorts of places in Essex that most people never visit."

As they toured Essex, Andrew and Andrea started to notice "odd little patches of white on the map, where there was no church. What had happened to it? We became curious."

So Andrew started to dig in the libraries. "I thought someone must have written something about the subject," he says - but there was nothing. In the classic words of James Thurber: "I went to the library to borrow a book and ended up writing it."

Documents and visual evidence about old churches are sparse, but with the bit between his teeth and using ancients maps, Edwardian postcards and dogged fieldwork, Andy was able to piece together some fascinating stories.

For instance, the ancient church of Milton (even the name is now known only as a Southend electoral ward) has at last been resurrected from centuries of oblivion.

"There are no records, but there was either a church or chapel on the site, and at some stage it was just swallowed by the sea."

At Langenhoe, the church fell victim to the great Essex Earthquake of 1882, and at East Hanningfield the villagers just moved lock, stock and barrel to a new village site, decided that the walk to the old church wasn't worth the effort, and built themselves a new one.

Beside the pleasure of telling a story that hasn't been told before, there is also the pleasure of detective work.

At West Horndon with just a copy of a Tudor map to assist him Andy located the long lost church site. "We reached this tree that marked the site and, sure enough, there was church masonry around the base.

"It's a strange feeling to imagine the church that once towered above an empty site like this, and I was perhaps the first person for a very long time to recognise this place for what it was."

Along with this excitement, of course, goes the occasional danger. At the abandoned ruins of Berners Roding church Andy was warned that there was a barn owl nesting.

"The first thing that struck me when I entered the church was the stench," he says. "The second is that, while a barn owl on a perch looks quite small, when she is coming at your face with her talons out and her wings out-stretched, she looks HUGE!

Of course, I normally like to get to know a church, but I didn't hang around that one."

The book that has emerged from all this is, to put it mildly, unlikely to be a moneyspinner. "But I've had the satisfaction of filling a gap in the historical records," says Andy. After that he moves on to a new subject - the abbeys and priories of Essex.

His eyes light up at the mere mention of these words. A new hunt beckons. "Not a lot of people realise it, but..." he begins.

Great expectations - Andrew Barham's search for the sites of long lost churches has led to a book

Picture: ROBIN WOOSEY

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.