Castle Hedingham

Castle Hedingham is a village in the northeast of the English county of Essex, which is located on the old road from Colchester to Cambridge in the valley of the Colne.

The village developed around Hedingham Castle, the ancestral home of the de Veres, Earls of Oxford. The first Earl, Aubrey III. de Vere, completed the construction of the keep and established a Benedictine abbey near. Hugh de Vere, 4th Earl of Oxford was granted market rights for the village mid-13th century and laid in 1250 the foundation stone for a hospital.

The Church of St. Nicholas from the late Romanesque and Gothic period was built around 1180th The fine double hammer-beam - vault is Thomas Loveday attributed, who was also responsible for the work at St John's College, Cambridge.

The village was connected to the Colne Valley & Halstead Railway Company railway line until 1867-1964. The old station was dismantled in 1974 by the Colne Valley Railway Preservation Society and reconstructed as a museum railway Colne Valley Railway at a new location in the north- west of the village again.