Pitsea Mount is one of the best places for understanding how old Pitsea relates to the modern town. The surviving church tower occupies the commanding hilltop position that made the site a landmark long before today's major roads surrounded it.
Pitsea appears in the Domesday Book, while documentary evidence for a church here reaches back to the twelfth century. The religious connection continued through the medieval period when St John's Abbey, Colchester held land in Pitsea.
The west tower that survives today was built in the early sixteenth century. Historic England lists the surviving tower and altar at Grade II, recognising both the craftsmanship of the remains and their importance to the story of Pitsea.
The old church changed substantially in 1871 when the nave and chancel were rebuilt to designs by noted church architect Sir Arthur Blomfield. This produced the church remembered in many twentieth-century photographs while retaining the much older tower.
Structural concerns increasingly affected the church during the twentieth century. St Michael's became semi-redundant, the final wedding is recorded in 1975 and the final service took place in 1982. Most of the Victorian church was eventually demolished, leaving the historic tower and altar as the principal surviving remains.
The importance of the site is not simply the age of the masonry. Standing on the mount makes the contrast between old and modern Pitsea unusually clear: an early church tower survives above roads and development that arrived many centuries later.