Mazes, art and market heritage
Saffron Walden
Victorian gardens, Great Bardfield art, a medieval church and an ancient turf maze frame a town shaped by saffron and malt.
- Best for
- Gardens, art and layered town history
- Give it
- A full day at an unhurried pace
- Don't miss
- The turf maze on the Common
Photo: Libby norman · CC BY-SA 3.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A market town of mazes and makers
Saffron Walden links free historic spaces, the North West Essex Collection and Essex's largest parish church.
Start with the turf maze and Bridge End Gardens, then follow the town's history through the Fry Art Gallery, St Mary the Virgin and Saffron Walden Museum. The open-air market and timber-framed Eight Bells add living town-centre character, while Audley End House and Gardens extends the visit to the western edge of town.
Where to go
Places in Saffron Walden
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesBridge End Gardens
Seven interlinked restored nineteenth-century gardens laid out by the Gibson family, including a rose garden, walled garden and hedge maze.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- north-west of the centre
- Access
- Free to enter.
Saffron Walden Museum
A family-friendly natural history and archaeology museum founded in 1835, with Wallace the lion among its exhibits.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- beside the castle ruins
Audley End House & Gardens
A Jacobean mansion with state rooms, Capability Brown parkland, kitchen gardens and stables.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 180 minutes
- Locality
- western edge of town
Food & drink
2 placesThe Eight Bells
A well-known dining pub in a medieval or Tudor timber-framed building that has been Grade II* listed since 1951.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- 18 Bridge Street
Saffron Walden Market
A long-running open-air market backed by market rights dating to a charter of around 1300.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- the Market Square
- Access
- Held on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
History & heritage
4 placesThe Turf Maze on the Common
A turf maze about 100 feet across, first recorded in 1699 and most recently restored in 1979.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 30 minutes
- Locality
- the Common on the east side of town
- Access
- Free to walk.
Fry Art Gallery
Home to the North West Essex Collection of more than 3,000 works by Great Bardfield artists including Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- adjoining Bridge End Gardens
Walden Castle
The ruined basement of a Norman keep dating from around 1140.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 30 minutes
- Locality
- beside Saffron Walden Museum
- Access
- Free to see.
St Mary the Virgin
Essex's largest parish church, rebuilt in Perpendicular Gothic by John Wastell, with a 193-foot spire and the tomb of Sir Thomas Audley.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Saffron Walden
No places match this filter. Choose All places to reset the list.
Three ways to explore Saffron Walden
Signature outings
Walk the Turf Maze
Follow the free-to-walk turf maze on the Common, first recorded in 1699 and most recently recut in 1979.
Explore the North West Essex Collection
See work by Great Bardfield artists including Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious in the Fry Art Gallery's collection of more than 3,000 works.
Enter Essex's Largest Parish Church
Visit St Mary the Virgin for John Wastell's Perpendicular Gothic work, its 193-foot spire and Sir Thomas Audley's tomb.
The town story
Saffron Walden Town Guide
Mazes, art, timber frames and saffron history give this north-west Essex town its distinctive shape.
Mazes, Gardens and Great Bardfield Art
The turf maze cut into the Common on the east side of town is about a hundred feet across, first recorded in 1699 and last recut in 1979. It is thought to be the largest turf maze of its kind in England, and free to walk.
North-west of the centre sit Bridge End Gardens, seven interlinked Victorian gardens laid out by the Gibson family from around 1840 — a rose garden, a walled garden, and a restored hedge maze, free to enter. The Gibsons were Quaker bankers connected to the founding of Barclays. Adjoining the gardens, the Fry Art Gallery holds the North West Essex Collection, more than three thousand works by the Great Bardfield artists, Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious among them. Bawden lived at 2 Park Lane Studio until 1989.
Timber Frames and Market Days
For pubs, the Eight Bells on Bridge Street is the best-known dining pub, a timber-framed inn that has been Grade II* listed since 1951. The Cross Keys is another of the town's medieval timber-framed buildings, on the High Street corner by the market. The Temeraire is the Wetherspoon, open from eight in the morning and named after the ship Sir Eliab Harvey, a member of the local Harvey family, commanded at Trafalgar in 1805; it stood second in line behind Nelson's Victory and later became the subject of Turner's painting. The Old Sun Inn no longer pours a pint, but it is worth a look for its elaborate seventeenth-century pargeting, the moulded plasterwork across its front. Cromwell is said to have lodged there in May 1647, when the New Model Army made the town its headquarters.
The open-air market fills the Market Square on Tuesdays and Saturdays, as it has in some form since a charter of around 1300. Independent shops, delis and cafes cluster around the Market Place, Cross Street and King Street.
Church, Saffron and Malt
St Mary the Virgin is the largest parish church in Essex, 183 feet long, rebuilt in Perpendicular Gothic by John Wastell — the master mason behind King's College Chapel, also associated with Canterbury's Bell Harry tower. Its spire rises 193 feet, the tallest in the county, added in 1832. Inside lies the tomb of Sir Thomas Audley, Lord Chancellor, of Audley End across the fields to the west.
The name is a pun the town wears on its coat of arms: a saffron crocus set within castle walls, "Saffron walled-in." The crocus was grown here from the sixteenth century for dye, medicine and flavouring, and gave the town its name by the 1540s. When demand collapsed, malt took over — more than forty maltings by 1800.
Paths, Rail Links and Wallace
Walkers can pick up the Harcamlow Way, a 141-mile figure-of-eight between Harlow and Cambridge, running through the centre. Footpaths west lead toward Audley End and the River Cam valley. The nearest station is Audley End, two miles south-west; the town's own branch line closed in 1964 and never came back. Cambridge and the aircraft at Duxford are both about fifteen miles north.
In the museum, founded in 1835, stands Wallace, a lion who lived from 1812 to 1838 and is said to have inspired the poem about the lion and Albert.
Stay around Essex
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Essex, linked directly to their property pages.
A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden.jpg — photograph by Libby norman; User:Libby norman. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- The Turf Maze on the Common — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Bridge End Gardens — saffronwalden.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Fry Art Gallery — fryartgallery.org operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Saffron Walden Museum — saffronwaldenmuseum.org operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Walden Castle — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- St Mary the Virgin — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- The Eight Bells — theeightbellssaffronwalden.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Saffron Walden Market — saffronwalden.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Audley End House & Gardens — english-heritage.org.uk national body or asset manager