In medieval London there were once around sixty monasteries, most of them swept away in the 16th century under Henry VIII. When I visit places like Waltham Abbey, I find it difficult not to think about that disappearance—not as an abstract historical fact, but as something almost physical, as if an entire layer of life had been stripped away. What survives feels fragmentary, but also strangely concentrated, as though time has pressed everything into what remains.
Waltham Abbey itself is only a portion of what it once was, preserved almost by accident through continued local use. Yet the moment I stepped inside, it didn’t feel diminished. If anything, it felt more intense. The Norman stonework has a kind of weight that is hard to describe—solid, uncompromising, almost severe. The pillars, with their deep-cut grooves, give the impression not just of craftsmanship but of force, as if they had been carved out of a harsher world.

I knew, of course, that the abbey is associated with Harold II of England, who died at the Battle of Hastings. Standing near his tomb, it felt less like encountering a historical figure and more like standing at the edge of a break in time—the moment when one England gave way to another. There was nothing dramatic about it, just a quiet awareness that something had ended there.
What surprised me was that the visit didn’t fully register until later. It was only after seeing the Victorian copy of the Bayeux Tapestry at the Reading Museum that everything came together. Looking at the image of Harold at Hastings—whether struck by an arrow in the eye or cut down in the confusion of battle—I suddenly realised that I had already been to the place where he was said to be buried.
That realisation was oddly powerful. It connected what had seemed like separate experiences: an image in a museum, a place visited almost casually, a historical narrative I thought I already knew. For a moment, they formed a single thread. The story was no longer just something observed; it had become something I had, in a sense, moved through.

Inside the abbey, other details lingered in a quieter way. The painted tombs, especially those showing children, made me pause—there is always that unspoken question about how many lives were cut short. The presence of Thomas Tallis added another layer, a reminder that this was not only a place of endings but also of creation, of music that has outlasted the building itself.
I was particularly struck by the astrological ceiling. At first it seems decorative, but the more I looked, the more it revealed itself as something structured and symbolic. Leo, my own sign, tied to the sun and to cycles of growth and harvest; Pisces, my wife’s, suggesting transition and duality. It turned the passage of time into something almost narrative—a movement from ending to renewal. I found myself thinking about how often medieval thought brings these things together so naturally: time, faith, nature, and human life all part of the same pattern.

Outside, the town itself felt unexpectedly complete, almost like an idealised version of an English village, with its half-timbered houses and quiet streets. Even the fact that the Prime Meridian runs through it seemed to reinforce that sense of standing at a kind of invisible line.
Lunch was traditional—eel, pie, mash and liquor, followed by cherry pie and custard. I can’t say I’ve developed a taste for eels, but that hardly mattered. What stayed with me was the atmosphere, the sense of stepping briefly into another rhythm of life, something closer to the Victorian world than to the present.

By the time we left, taking the Underground back from Loughton with its unexpectedly elegant 1940s station designed by John Murray Easton, the day felt less like a sequence of visits and more like a set of connections slowly revealing themselves. Waltham Abbey had not been dramatic or overwhelming, but it had a way of staying with me—quietly, and then more insistently afterwards—until the different pieces of history, place, and memory settled into something that felt unexpectedly whole.