Great Saling

White Hart in Great Saling

Great Saling is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of The Salings,^[1] in the Braintree district of the English county of Essex. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 Census was 282.^[2] It is near the town of Braintree. The hamlet of Blake End was part of the parish.

The village had on its green what was reputed to be the largest elm tree in England. With a girth of 22 feet 6 inches and a height of 40 metres, the elm was identified by the botanist R. H. Richens as an Ulmus × hollandica hybrid, before it succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease in the 1970s.^[3]^[4]^[5]

The village features the first aerodrome to be built by the Americans in this country. Work on Andrews Field aerodrome https://andrewsfield.com/ was started in July 1942 and built in under a year. The aerodrome is named after one of the famous generals of the American air force, Frank M. Andrews. The runways were built with the hardcore that came from the ruins of the London blitz.

The parish church is dedicated to St James, and is in the Diocese of Chelmsford. It is Grade II* listed.^[6]

The Great Saling elm

References[]

^ "The Salings". Mapit. Retrieved 27 June 2019.
^ "Civil Parish population 2011". Neighbourhood Statistics. Office for National Statistics. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
^ Hanson, M. W. (1990). Essex elm. London: Essex Field Club. ISBN 978-0-905637-15-0.
^ R. H. Richens, Elm (Cambridge 1983), p.243
^ Photograph of the Great Saling elm: Plate 402 in Elwes & Henry's Trees of Great Britain & Ireland, Vol. VII, pp 1848-1929; private publication, Edinburgh (1913) "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2015-02-05.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^ Historic England. "Church of St James (1147381)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 15 March 2016.