On the edge

It's not every day you see a chapel dating from AD654, but today I did. This is St Peter ad Murum (on the Wall), which stands on a windswept Essex coast where the Blackwater Estuary meets the North Sea.

It was built by St Cedd as a missionary outpost on the wall of a Roman fort called Othona, and is near the village of Bradwell-on-Sea, or more classically Bradwell juxta Mare.

The chapel has a certain simplicity within as well as without. The building's walls may take you out of the worst of the wind but you still hear it whistling through the rafters.

In Britain, we may live in a predominantly secular society, but the chapel's relative permanence is emphasised by the somewhat temporary activity within a couple of miles at Bradwell power station, an incredibly ugly edifice that I also visited today.

It generated electricity from 1962 to 2002, as the website of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority notes, which is a clue to its future: licensed to the Magnox South company for "defuelling/decommissioning and termination".