During my research on the history of Great Baddow, I discovered that it was all very confusing. Even more confusing when I discovered that five hundred million years ago Great Baddow began life as a blob of rock that popped up in the south pole and drifted steadily north, sometimes underwater gathering silt and old fish bones, and sometimes above water gathering vegetation and the odd dinosaur. It still seems to be carrying on the tradition.

From Essex Rock, Mercer & Mercer 2022.
This piece of information is perhaps only great in its obscurity, though I understand if you are trying to put in a decent Essex road system the weird textures of this ancient mix of dead mangroves and fish heads can cause havoc with laying down an even surface. So before pneumatic heavy rollers, the best means of transport around the place were the murky rivers and it was via this route that hunter gatherer types ventured forth.

The ones that the indigenous population of these islands are related to are, if current DNA testing is to be believed, mostly the Beaker People who left various rocks and pots in the area, though nothing as grand as the rocks we call Stone Henge. Here in Great Baddow the builders no doubt promised to come and stick up a few stones but never turned up because they were too busy on some other job.
It is said that the old Bee Hive Pub had a Sarsen Stone, the kind that one finds being used on Salisbury Plain, but it disappeared along with the pub and, if the photo is anything to go by, it was probably just a lump of stone from the local gravel pits put there as a way for fat people to get on their horses. You can find a few lumps of rock around farm gates that have some ancient history, possibly having been used by the romans to demarcate land borders of sorts. But there is nothing grand about them.

The Beehive pub

Old Beehive Quarry, Chelmsford
Great Baddow was a mix of forests and squelchy watery places that began attracting a few more settled characters about four or five thousand years ago. Manor Farm has a few bronze age ditches and pot shards to show for it. Fish and fowl would have been easy prey and I assume security was good because one could hear any bandits squelching through the reed beds with the idea of stealing your women. Pots they would have had plenty of, so nothing else would have motivated them.

The Manor Farm Shop
If there were bandits, they were probably the Trinovante Tribe who came in from the lowlands of Europe, Belgic invaders as the historians have it. The name means something like the New Comers or perhaps The Invaders, and they called this area the murky water place, or Beadwan.
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, a 12th century historian, they had grand ideas about who they were and thought of themselves as wandering Trojans. Britain was said to be named after Brutus, the great grandson of Aeneas of Troy. The story was that this Brutus killed his father, ran off to Greece where he freed some enslaved Trojans, and fled to Totness in Devon as you do, and created The New Troy. Given what happened to the old one, this was perhaps not an auspicious start. Let’s just say, even the Trinovante were probably not daft enough to believe any of that.
The Romans on the other hand, thought of themselves as Trojans and consequently, or coincidentally, the Trinovante were a bit keen on being friends with them. Probably they saw what the Romans had done with their Celtic cousins in Gaul or were keen on having underfloor heating installed. They thus allied with Julius Caesar and remained pro-Roman until the Romans succeeded in establishing colonies at Colchester and Chelmsford.


Their temple on the Army and Navy Roundabout was very annoying even then. So when Boudicca of the Iceni took against the Romans, they joined her and burnt everything Roman down. This did not end well. Everyone died, and the Romans just kept on coming. And if that map recently discovered by Chat GPT, that font of all digital wisdom, is anything to go by, the Romans were greatly confused.
After the Romans had finally worked out where they were and taken their revenge, Great Baddow remained not so great, and locals who could not get with the programme faded into impoverished oblivion. London then developed into the main centre of the Roman administration and Colchester became a religious centre, leaving the rest of Essex a quiet backwater where retired Legionnaires whiled away their twilight years with a bit farming and trading. All the real Romano British action took place in London and the west of Britain. Which made this area ripe for the advent of The English! Well, the Angles, Jutes, Frisians, and er the Saxons. Hurrah!