Saffron Walden in Spring: The Essex Town Named After a Flower

Saffron Walden is an hour from Liverpool Street and it is named after a flower. Not a family, not a river, not a hill. A crocus. For something like four hundred years the fields around this Essex market town were purple in autumn with Crocus sativus, and the town got rich enough on the three red threads inside each flower that it changed its own name to say so.

I went at Easter, when the verges were full of daffodils and there was blossom hanging over the pastel cottages, and spent an afternoon walking around photographing doors. Here is what is here: the timber-framed houses, the plasterwork, the largest turf maze in Europe, a free Victorian garden, and a great house a twenty-minute walk away.

The Flower That Named the Town

It was Walden first, meaning valley of the Britons, and then Chipping Walden, chipping meaning market. Saffron growing took off in the late Middle Ages, peaked in the 1500s, and had stopped entirely by the 1700s. Somewhere in the middle of that, the town simply started calling itself after the crop. The name had shifted by the mid-sixteenth century, and the earliest written form anyone has found, saffornewalden, appears in a deed of 1582.

Saffron is the dried stigma of the crocus, three per flower, picked by hand, and it takes thousands of flowers to produce a few ounces. It went into medicines, into food as a condiment, into perfume, into dye, and it was widely believed to be an aphrodisiac, which is presumably why the price held up. Henry VIII's charter to the town in 1514 was decorated with the crocus, and the informal arms of the town became saffron flowers inside castle walls, a visual pun on saffron walled-in. The crocus is still on the arms, granted formally in 1961.

Growers have come back in recent years, and Essex saffron now sells at a premium largely because of the name on the packet. Four hundred years of branding, eventually paying off.

Pargeting, and the Giants on the Old Sun Inn

The thing to look up at here is the plasterwork. Pargeting is decorative relief work applied to the outside of a building, usually in the panels between the timbers of a half-timbered house, worked into wet lime plaster with combs, stamps or by hand. It flourished in the seventeenth century, faded, and was revived by the Arts and Crafts movement at the end of the nineteenth. It is an East Anglian speciality, concentrated in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, and Saffron Walden has an unusual density of it, including panels worked with saffron crocus motifs.

The famous one is the Old Sun Inn on Church Street, Grade I listed with fourteenth-century origins, timber-framed and jettied. The western gable carries two large figures in seventeenth-century dress, stockinged legs and heeled shoes with spurs, one holding a cross-hilted sword and buckler and the other a nail-studded club, with a circular panel between them.

They have been called Gog and Magog for generations, and every guidebook says so. Current scholarship reads them differently: as Tom Hickathrift, an East Anglian folk hero of the Jack the Giant Killer type, fighting the Wisbech giant, with that circular panel being the cartwheel Hickathrift used as a shield. Both names are worth knowing, because locals will use the first one.

Beyond the Old Sun, just wander. Church Street and Bridge Street have the best of the timber-framed and colourwashed houses, jettied upper floors leaning out over the pavement, painted in ox-blood red, sage, dusty pink, ochre and pale blue. There is a deep red timber-framed house on a corner with tall brick chimneys that stopped me dead. Every door has a name rather than a number and half of them have a rose or a clematis grown over the frame.

The Church, the Castle and the Museum

St Mary the Virgin is the largest parish church in Essex, and it does not look like a market-town church at all. There was a Norman church here recorded in 1130; the present building is largely a rebuilding of 1250 to 1258 followed by a great Perpendicular reconstruction from about 1450, with John Wastell, the master mason of King's College Chapel in Cambridge, involved. It is 183 feet long. The spire, at 193 feet the tallest in Essex, is a later addition, designed by Thomas Rickman and Henry Hutchinson and added in 1832 after lightning damage. Grade I listed, free to enter, and worth ten minutes.

Behind the museum are the flint rubble ruins of Walden Castle, built by Geoffrey de Mandeville between 1141 and 1143. Not much survives, but it is free and you can walk right up to it.

Saffron Walden Museum itself was founded in 1835 and stands in the castle grounds. Local history, natural history and world cultures, five pounds for an adult and free for under-eighteens, with an annual pass for sixteen. It is closed on Mondays and given over to school groups on Wednesdays in term time, so plan around that.

The Biggest Turf Maze in Europe

Out on the Common there is a labyrinth cut into the grass, its paths edged with bricks set on edge. It is unicursal, meaning there are no wrong turns, only one very long way in and the same way back out.

The main circular figure is about twenty-seven metres across, and with its four horseshoe-shaped corner bastions it measures roughly forty metres corner to corner. The pattern is an unusual seventeen-circuit medieval design. An 1816 survey measured the path at just under two-thirds of a mile, which is worth knowing because people will tell you it is a mile, and it is not.

It is thought to be medieval in origin. The earliest documentary evidence is 1699, when the town accounts record fifteen shillings paid for cutting the maze at the end of the common, a sum big enough that it may record the original cutting rather than a recut. It has been recut repeatedly since, in 1828, 1841, 1859, 1887, 1911, when the bricks were laid under the paths, around 1950 and again between 1978 and 1980.

It is the largest surviving turf maze in England and in Europe. Two bigger ones are known, at Pimperne in Dorset and Stolp in Poland, and both are gone. A large ash tree once stood at the centre of this one and burned down during Guy Fawkes celebrations in November 1823. It is a Scheduled Monument; it is free, it is unfenced, and it is open at all hours. Walking the whole thing takes about twenty minutes and is oddly calming.

A Free Victorian Garden and a Free Gallery

Bridge End Garden on Bridge Street is a Grade II star registered Victorian garden of about two and a half hectares, laid out from around 1840 by the Gibson family, Quaker brewers and bankers of the town. It is a sequence of seven interlocking garden rooms: a walled garden, a rose garden, a Dutch garden and a hedge maze.

It is free and open daily except Christmas Day, though the walled garden keeps shorter hours and the hedge maze has its own restricted access, so ring ahead if the maze is the reason you are going.

The Fry Art Gallery on Castle Street is also free and is the reason a lot of people who know about it come at all. It holds the North West Essex Collection: paintings, prints, illustration and wallpaper designs by artists connected with the area, above all the Great Bardfield group, including Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious and John Aldridge. It is entirely volunteer-run and it is seasonal, open roughly from early April to late October, Tuesday to Sunday afternoons and Saturday from eleven. In winter it is shut.

The market runs on Tuesdays and Saturdays in Market Place, Saturday being the bigger and more varied of the two. The town council traces its market rights to a charter of 1141, which makes this one of the longest continuously running markets in the country.

Audley End Is a Walk Away

The other reason to come is that Audley End House, one of the great Jacobean houses of England and now run by English Heritage, is a twenty-to-thirty-minute walk from the High Street on public footpaths across the park. That is the correct way to do it. It is a lovely walk and it turns two half-days into one very good day.

It also solves the transport problem. Audley End railway station is confusingly not next to Audley End House: it is just over a mile from the house along a busy main road, and about two miles from the town. English Heritage themselves recommend taking the bus from the station into Saffron Walden and walking out to the house from there, which is shorter, quieter and prettier.

There is a useful discount attached: show a bus ticket, a train ticket or a bike helmet at Audley End, and you get twenty per cent off the walk-up admission price, valid through to March 2027. Worth having your ticket in your hand at the desk.

Saffron Walden in Spring

Spring is when I would come. The Common fills with daffodils, there is blossom over the cottage rows, and the colourwashed fronts, which can look a bit flat under a grey winter sky, come into their own with a bit of sun on them.

There is no big town-wide Easter event, so do not travel for one. What does happen reliably is English Heritage's Easter trail at Audley End over the school holidays, which is a paid family thing and good if you have children. The local horticultural society runs a spring show in mid-April on a village hall scale.

One planning note. An early Easter puts you in the daffodil window, a late one in the blossom window, and they are three or four weeks apart. If you want the blossom, aim for mid-April into early May rather than the Easter weekend itself.

Visiting Saffron Walden: Practical Notes

Where it is: Saffron Walden, Essex CB10, on the edge of the Essex and Cambridgeshire border country, about fifteen miles south of Cambridge.

By train: Greater Anglia to Audley End station, about fifty-five minutes to an hour from London Liverpool Street and around twenty minutes from Cambridge. The station is roughly two miles from the town centre, so take the bus or a taxi from the rank rather than walking it along the road. Sunday services are thin, so check both directions before you commit.

By car: M11 northbound, leave at junction 9a and follow the signs. Realistically an hour and a quarter to an hour and three quarters from central London depending on the traffic.

Parking: several pay and display car parks including the Common, Swan Meadow on Park Lane and Fairycroft Road, some card-payment only, plus free long stay at Catons Lane. Blue badge bays in every car park, and on King Street except on market days.

Cost: the town is free. The market, the Common, the turf maze, the castle ruins, Bridge End Garden and the Fry Art Gallery cost nothing. Only the museum, at five pounds, and Audley End charge anything.

Best time to go: April to October, because the Fry only opens in that window. Saturday for the bigger market. Avoid Monday if you want the museum.

How long to allow: three or four hours for the town, a full day if you walk out to Audley End.

If pretty English towns are what you are after, the Cotswolds versions are two hours the other way: nine of the prettiest villages, Castle Combe and a day trip to Burford and Witney. Saffron Walden's advantage is that it is an hour from Liverpool Street and almost nobody from London thinks of it.

Go for the maze, stay for the doors, and walk out to the great house through the park.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.