A FRIEND was talking to me recently about his memories of growing up in Maldon.

His family home was on Beacon Hill where he enjoyed looking out of the window at the view across to Beeleigh.

Then he mentioned something that I found particularly intriguing.

“On the opposite side of the valley”, he said, “in a field to the north-east of Wintersleet Farm, it was possible to make out the faint traces of buildings and a slight levelling off of the land. I was told it was the site of an old brickworks.”

This was a new one on me, so I decided to do a bit of research.

Where better to start than my trusty, well-thumbed copy of Fitch’s ‘History of Maldon and the River Blackwater”.

First published in 1894, Fitch describes the local topography in the form of what he would have called a “perambulation”.

Having visited Beeleigh Abbey, he joins the main road at the junction with today’s Abbey Turning and heads back into town.

“Returning to Maldon by the London Road”, as he puts it, “we find, on the right, the cemetery... then cross the new railway bridge near the old brick kiln.”

So my friend was quite right, there was indeed a brickworks in that field.

By calling it “old”, Fitch seems to imply that it was by then no longer functioning. So when did it exist as a local business and what is its story?

The site is definitely marked on the Ordnance Survey of 1873 and after consulting other documents a name then emerged – that of David Wright.

Born in Springfield (Chelmsford) around 1817, he is described in the census return for 1861 as a “brickmaker” and employed “five men and five boys”.

Not only that, but he doubled as landlord of the now long-gone Duke of Wellington Inn, which stood, until 1964, at the far end of London Road, on the corner of Wellington Road.

He lived there with his wife Rebecca, son David J Wright, and they had a young servant – Eliza Gaywood.

One can imagine David’s daily trek from the pub to the kiln. Business must have been booming to employ that number of workers, but then as AFJ Brown puts it in his ‘Essex at Work’ (ERO 1969), “the absence of building stone (in this area) made brickmaking an essential industry”.

Going back further in time to 1851, David Wright is still seen performing his dual role.

In fact the records indicate that he ran the London Road brick and tile kiln from around 1848 to 1862 (and carried on as publican of the Duke of Wellington until his death in1883).

However, David wasn’t the first to operate the London Road brick business.

It was probably started around 1832 by the then owner David Hearn. He would have had what is known as a “bottle or beehive” kiln, so called because of its distinctive shape.

This would have been stacked with pre-dried “green” bricks, made from local clay in sanded wooden moulds and they would have been fired at a temperature produced by a constant feed of combustible material. The whole, labour intensive process could take six days, three of them in the firing.

Of course, none of this brick-making would have been possible without an adequate supply of suitable clay and here we might have hit upon the reason for the location.

The boggy ground of the Wintersleet and the surrounding Beeleigh countryside seems to have been an ideal source.

The Tithe Award of 1840 shows a ‘Brick Mead’, near Great and Little Beeleigh Farms and I have always been led to believe that ‘Hilly Field’ at the end of Dykes Chase was another source.

Historian and brick expert Pat Ryan includes the London Road kiln in her comprehensive study ‘Brick in Essex’ (1999), confirming it to have been “on the north side of London Road, 135m east of the cemetery gate”.

She puts its closure date as slightly later than Fitch – in 1897, but then goes on to mention “a field named ‘Brick Clamps’ shown on a map of 1759 (cut by railway, now bypass)”.

This appears to be the very same site, but a clamp was something quite different to a kiln.

With this method the unfired bricks are stacked into a rectangular structure with tunnels running through it, into which bundles of wood or faggots were placed.

This was then covered with turf and set alight, and it would burn for two or three weeks until the bricks were fired.

As early as 1759 might seem, during excavations in a field next to Beeleigh Abbey (throughout 2001-2005) a striped pattern was revealed in the ground comprising bands of crushed brick and earth – the distinctive archaeology of a clamp.

In the churchwarden’s accounts for nearby Heybridge, “2000 Brickkes” were purchased of that same “Lord Abbot of Bileigh” and transported to the church of St Andrew’s to repair the tower.

The year was 1517, indicating a continuity of local brickmaking for at least 350 years.

And based on that Heybridge delivery, the evidence of Beeleigh and London Road brick production could still be hidden in the walls of the older buildings across our ancient town.