Pitsea Mount is one of the most historically important locations in Pitsea. Long before the modern shopping centre, A13, New Town estates or railway reshaped the district, the elevated site formed a focal point in a landscape of fields, marshes and scattered settlement. Its height made the church visible over a wide area and helped establish the Mount as one of old Pitsea's defining landmarks.
Pitsea itself appears in the Domesday record, but the surviving church structure is much later. Historic England records that the earliest documentary evidence currently identified for a church at Pitsea occurs in 12th-century records connected with St John's Abbey, Colchester. The abbey continued to hold Pitsea until its dissolution in 1539.
The west tower that survives today was built in the early sixteenth century. It is therefore not the first church structure to occupy the Mount, but it is the oldest substantial part still standing. Built of coursed and squared limestone with sandstone dressings, the square tower rises in three stages and has an embattled parapet.
Before modern development obscured many long views, the church occupied a far more commanding position in the landscape. From the Mount the relationship between old Pitsea, the low-lying marshes and surrounding farmland would have been much clearer. The church was both a place of worship and a visual reference point for people moving through the district.
The surviving tower still shows evidence of the vanished church. On its eastern face the outline, or scar, of the former gabled nave can be seen where the main body of the church once joined it. The former bell chamber has openings on the upper stage, while the doorway that once led from the tower into the nave survives below.
Structural trouble was not simply a modern problem. Historic England records a visitation by the Reverend W. J. Pressey in 1685 which described the church as being in poor condition and leaning. This is important because it shows that instability affected St Michael's centuries before the road building and decline of the twentieth century.