Editorial

Our New Website

The new ‘legacy’ website of the High Country History Group has been live for about a month. We hope you have had opportunity to take a look at the wide range of articles produced in past journals and series of talks and outings held over the years. Visit this free to access website at www.highcountryhistorygroup.org. We are realising that being online is different to the quarterly release of articles and that some form series, or collections, while others stand alone.

Mind The Gaps!

Having a searchable online database by every word written in an article is amazing. It can also establish which items lurking on laptops have never been published by the Group. It can also establish where the gaps are too for current and future researchers of Essex history in our four rural parishes.

This Journal (and probably a couple more) is intended to fill the gaps. And without a limit of 40 pages of A5 paper we are much freer to produce items that are likely to be of interest to a local as well as global audience.

This Edition

The new website includes a timeline of the parishes drawn from the Victoria County History, Volume 4. We provide links to individual sections of the original work in an item below.

In this edition of the Journal there are a series of articles on Parish Registers, providing context to all of the items previously published that have referenced baptisms, marriages and burials.

Translating Latin and filling a gap in the publication of Elizabeth Ogborne’s 1817 Volume on Essex is also included.

There is also a sequence of articles by H. M. Scott on Stanford Rivers, one about the manors of that parish. And it would be bad manners not to include the Manors of Theydon Mount too.

The Ongar Union Workhouse was once at Little End, Stanford Rivers. We missed reporting on Fearne Cotton’s ancestorial connection.

There are Book Reviews too.

Finally, a new article on the Register of British Slave-Traders, the topic of a BBC series in September 2026. We look for the names of local investors.

Inevitably historians slip into talking about the weather, which was the case when the Parish Registers of Blackmore were transcribed in 1897. R. H. Browne mentioned the devastating midsummer hailstorm that year which became the springboard to further research, a talk and a booklet which is reproduced in full.

With a nod to past historians I must close that the summer of 2026 was the hottest on record, with five heatwaves, a maximum temperature of 38.1°C at Kew Gardens in London. Three days’ temperatures have entered the Top 10 highest ever. The Met Office say that the weather of the twentieth century is over and we are now in a period of climate change.