Essex is a place where you learn to expect the unexpected. If you know where to look, there’s history and mystery at every turn, and this book is here to help you find it all. It brings you stories of strange places with weird names, mystery buildings that make no sense until you know their history, bizarre legends, forgotten facts, lost villages, unknown islands, spirits and ghosts, witches and smugglers.

Who knows, for example, the part played by Essex in the colonisation of America? Or that a town in Essex was once the capital of England? Did you know that Captain Cook was married in Essex prior to setting out on his voyages of discovery? Or that legend has it that the story of Saint George slaying a dragon might have begun on Essex soil?

All this and more is described by writer and photographer John Wade in Illustrated Tales of Essex. In it he reveals that Essex’s people and places of the past are a million miles away from the modern-day reality-TV view of the county.