National Trust & English Heritage places in Essex

Ornate Elizabethan fishing lodge in Colchester converted to a watermill with a working waterwheel.

One of Europe's oldest surviving timber-framed barns, dating from around 1140.

Working farm and saltmarsh on the Blackwater Estuary near Colchester, with farm trails, a sea wall walk and a bird hide for wintering geese and waders.

Ancient woodland and heathland nature reserve in the Essex countryside.

A thousand-year-old royal hunting forest with ancient woodland, a lake and an ornamental Shell House.

An Essex tidal island, site of the 991 AD Battle of Maldon, rich in birdlife.

Richly carved Tudor wool merchant's house in Coggeshall with exceptional 16th-century woodwork.

A tidal Essex island near Mersea, an important reserve for waders and brent geese.

A Norman castle mound in the centre of Rayleigh with views across south Essex.

Jacobean country house with Victorian service rooms, resident horses, kitchen gardens and Capability Brown parkland.

Two stretches of the late Iron Age banks and ditches that guarded the western side of pre-Roman Colchester.

Twin classical towers from Robert Adam's Georgian church, beside the Stour at Mistley.

A fifteenth-century aisled barn whose crown-post roof was built from some 400 oak trees.

The ruined church of one of England's first Augustinian priories, built of flint and Roman brick and wrecked by cannon fire in the siege of 1648.

A pinnacled 15th-century flint gatehouse, the sole survivor of Colchester's Benedictine abbey of St John, stormed in the 1648 siege.

A 14th-century abbey gatehouse and bridge in Waltham Abbey Gardens, remnants of the great abbey linked with King Harold II.