Mundham is a big parish, but there are virtually no houses in it. The road rolls through from Loddon to Seething, sometimes deep in a cutting beneath hedgerows, sometimes out in the open between wide flat fields. The surviving parish church of St Peter survives at the extreme western side of the parish, but more centrally a little wooded copse hides the ruins of St Ethelbert.

I have since been told that, in summer, it is virtually impossible to find this ruin. Even in the middle of winter it was a job. Most of the trees are deciduous, but even so it was a struggle to push through the skeletal branches. I came to a place where the ground fell suddenly away, which I took to be the edge of the former graveyard. Somewhere beyond I battled into a place where a clump of tall elder trees grew. Looking around, there was a lattice of winter branches all about, with no church ruins that I could see.

It was only then that I noticed that the thick-trunked elders were not, in fact, trees at all, but three pillars of flint and stone topped by shaggy outcrops of elder. Two formed the east wall either side of a window, while the third formed part of the north wall. There are surviving blocks of stone in the former east window outline, and a putlog hole to the right of it.

For a building of which virtually nothing now survives, St Ethelbert has a fairly recent redundancy date of 1749. Well into the 19th century it was possible for antiquarians to date it as a largely 13th/14th century building.

Simon Knott, January 2005