Down a dead-end lane on a salt marsh, encircled by a forest of gnarled petrified oaks—a sight so strange that it inspired the Martian landing scene in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds—sits the only remains of an abandoned English village: the 13th-century church of Saint Mary’s. Christine McDonald and her friends were so intrigued by the ruins when they stumbled upon it as teenagers in Essex in the 1970s that they decided to make the church their hangout, despite the “keep out” signs, spiderwebs, and dead animals. The…
