The place is bisected by the River Stour, the county boundary from the end of its estuary to near its source. The village is most often referred to collectively, as Bures. On the respective banks are two civil parishes: Bures Hamlet in the Braintree district of Essex, and Bures St. Mary in the Babergh district of Suffolk. The village is a post town and its pre-1996 (obsolete) postal county was Suffolk.
On the left bank is the medieval-core church of St Mary the Virgin housing eight bells with the largest weighing 21 cwt.[2] They were augmented from six to eight bells in 1951 by Gillett and Johnston of Croydon.[3] In terms of the ecclesiastical parish, and thus history before the invention of civil parishes in the 1870s there is no division, save as to county; all falls into Bures St Mary, which extends to a similar distance on each side of the river.[4]
The Bures Dragon as seen from St Stephen's Chapel in August 2022. Browning of the grass surrounding it can be seen, due to the heatwaves in Great Britain at the time.
Approximately 1 mile (1.6km) east of the village, on the edge of the Dedham Vale (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty), is unique geoglyph, a chalk outline of a dragon, which was created as part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012. The shape of a dragon relates to a legend from the Middle Ages that tells the story of the knight Sir Richard Waldegrave, whose servants attempted to kill a dragon, but failed due to its tough hide.[5]
St Stephen's Chapel.
A viewpoint of the dragon can be accessed on a public footpath, close to St Stephen's chapel, the oldest building in the parish. The Archbishop of Canterbury dedicated the site to St Stephen on Saint Stephen's Day in 1218.[6]
The Chapel of St. Stephen, which was the private chapel of the Manor of Tany, or Tauney, contains the effigies of the 5th, 8th, and 11th Earls of Oxford from the House of de Vere. This chapel had fallen into disuse after the Reformation, and became, among other things, a barn. Hence its local name of Chapel Barn. It was restored to its present condition in the 1930s by members of the Probert family, and re-consecrated. It has long been popularly held to stand on the traditional site of the coronation of Edmund the Martyr, crowned King of the East Saxons on Christmas Day 855 or 856, as corroboration of which the chronicler Galfridus de Fontibus described the coronation as having taken place at "Bures, which is an ancient royal hill".[6] The De Veres the Earls of Oxford, were the great family of this border region, their star and boar decorating such great churches as those of Dedham, East Bergholt, Castle Hedingham and Lavenham among others, including Earls Colne itself. They inherited Colne Priory at the Dissolution, and used the chapel there as their principal burial place until the early 18th century.
