Cotehele, Cornwall

The beauties of imperfection

Modern window glass is almost perfectly flat, flatter than any pancake. It also has few if any internal imperfections, making it perfectly transparent, and it can be manufactured in large pieces, making sizeable uninterrupted shop windows possible. Old glass, especially pre-19th century glass, is full of imperfections and generally came in quite small pieces. It was often made by blowing a cylinder of glass, which the glass-blower then cut along one side and flattened out to make a sheet. Another method was to spin a mass of molten glass, producing a disc, which the glass-maker then cut up into small usable sections. Windows from the stained-glass one in medieval churches to the small panes in Tudor or Georgian windows, are glazed with glass made by hand in these ways.

Most of the time, people don’t notice the imperfections in old glass windows. But if you look closely you’ll see that their surfaces have a pleasant and characterful unevenness – which also distorts slightly what we see through them. The ancient house of Cotehele in Cornwall was built in the Tudor period; the interiors were modified in the 17th century and the building remains Tudor and Jacobean in character. Many of its windows retain their early glazing. You can see how, in my photograph, the imperfections – a series of curved and linear unevennesses or more random patterns – can be made out by looking at the shadows they cast on nearby walls and window reveals. These effects vary according to the light’s direction and intensity, but are wonderfully clear in the photograph that I took on a recent October afternoon.

The architectural character of a building is often very obvious, but sometimes reveals itself in subtle ways, catching us by surprise when a particular feature, like this window, has its time in the sun.

 

Cotehele, Cornwall

An ancient place

Cotehele is one of the most romantically beautiful houses in the care of the National Trust.* It was built by three generations of the Edgcumbe family during the Tudor period† and its interiors were upgraded in the 1650s. However, in 1547–53, when Cotehele was still unfinished, the family built another dwelling, Mount Edgcumbe House, about 12 miles away.§ Mount Edgcumbe became their main home, Cotehele was second in importance. Mount Edgcumbe was remodelled in the 18th century and its old, now unfashionable furnishings, were moved to Cotehele, where they have been ever since. As a result, Cotehele gives the impression of a rambling Tudor and Jacobean house, full of tapestries, oak furniture and four-poster beds, a perfect and apparently untouched upper-class country house of its period.

In fact there were later alterations, notably in 1862, when Cotehele became the home of the Victorian owner’s widowed mother. But these were done in harmony with the Tudor fabric. The right-hand end of the east range (lower photograph), dates to 1862, but you’d hardly know. It’s a house of local granite walls and chimneys, a mixture of tiny windows and large mullioned ones, of courtyards and towers. It covers a large footprint with architecture on a modest scale – there are no grand entrances or big architectural gestures. Even the towers are low-rise and only the hall has a high ceiling. The setting – terraced gardens, a steeply sloping valley garden, old orchards – is perfect. Inside and out, the place is uniquely atmospheric.

Cotehele seems a world apart from modernity or business, let alone industry. But it’s near the River Tamar, once a great highway for Devon and Cornwall, the counties of which it forms the border. The varied fruits of market gardening and mining were not far away. Perhaps that story will be the subject of another post.

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* The house passed to the Trust in 1947. They do, it seems to me, a fine job in looking after it and presenting it to the public. Electric light is kept to a minimum, which presumably helps preserve the contents and enhances the atmosphere. The volunteers who stand in each room are particularly enthusiastic and helpful in answering queries. There’s information, but nothing is over-interpreted. I’m indebted to the Trust’s guidebook for details about the house’s history.

† Specifically 1485–c. 1560

§ I’m not sure why they built this second house so close. More research is needed.

Cotehele, the east range, with 19th-century addition at the far end

Callington, Cornwall

Built to last

I didn’t want to leave Dupath well, the subject of my previous post, before commenting on the stone it’s built of – large blocks of hard, intractable Cornish granite. Although difficult to work (and punishing to the chisel) because of its hardness, granite is the material of many Cornish buildings, because in many places it is the most easily obtainable stone. In the Middle Ages, local stone was usually relatively cheap. What did cost a lot was transport: stone is heavy, roads were poor, and even river transport was laborious. So masons accepted the huge effort needed to shape granite into usable pieces and to smooth it enough to make an acceptably flat surface.

When you look at granite masonry closely, though, in the right light, its surfaces are rarely very smooth at all. Attracted by the view, I raised my camera to take the photograph above and paused to take in the rough stone. Each piece is a miniature landscape of lumps and bumps and irregular edges, the very opposite of the almost perfectly flat surfaces that can be obtained when a skilled mason works a piece of limestone in my native Cotswolds.

And yet, what character! It’s extraordinary stuff, this stone, and seems to embody physical strength. It may be a far cry from the immaculately smooth ashlar of most cathedrals, but when you look at the wall of this tiny chapel, it has a distinctive character of its own and certainly looks as if it has been built to last.

Callington, Cornwall

Well hidden

To a dedicated church-visitor like me, Cornwall is full of evidence of ancient piety. Not only are there many medieval churches, but these are often dedicated to local saints, obscure figures who are little known outside the country. There are also many holy wells, tiny structures erected near or over springs, which were built or maintained by the medieval church and whose water was said to have healing properties. One of the most beautiful of these small buildings is the Dupath well east of Callington.

It was built almost entirely of local granite – even the roof is made of granite slabs – in the early-16th century, and the shallow arch of the doorway is typical of the period. Its architecture is made more elaborate by pinnacles at each corner and the striking structure, topped by a cluster of pinnacles, above the entrance. This is a small bellcote, an unusual feature of a well house, but perhaps there because the well house performed some of the functions of a church – according to certain accounts, the building was sometimes used for baptisms. Most pilgrims came here for the water’s healing qualities, however. Inside the well house is a trough into which the water flows, suggesting that visitors might have bathed in it, rather than drinking the sacred fluid.

Holy wells were among the institutions (like monasteries and chantries) that were suppressed by Henry VIII in the 1530s. The working life of this well might therefore have been very short. But the building survived and spring water does not stop flowing at the whim of monarchs. So it may be that those who believed in the water’s healing properties (it was said to cure or ease whooping cough, for example) still came here.

Travel was slow and difficult in the Middle Ages. To get here, you’d have had to walk or possessed a horse. Even now it seems remote, and part of the charm of the place for today’s travellers is the approach and the setting. You park in a farmyard – the farmer apologised for the amount of mud in the yard and joked that there hadn’t been enough rain to wash it away. Across the yard there’s a sign and a very short track to the well, which stands against a background of trees and fields. It’s a magical spot, we might say today, and no doubt medieval believers felt it was magical too.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Artisans at work

At the time of my visit to Hull in the summer, there was building work going at the Wilberforce House Museum, making photography difficult. So I honed in on a detail of the entrance, excluding as many distracting objects as possible, to give an idea of the extraordinary architecture of this house of the 1660s. It was built for a merchant called Hugh Lister, later became the official residence of the Governor and Deputy Governor of Hull, and still later, in 1730–1832, was owned by the Wilberforces, the family of the celebrated anti-slavery campaigner.*

The elaborate architectural style is known as Artisan Mannerism, a fashion created not by architects but by stonemasons and bricklayers, drawing on pattern books of classical architecture (some of which were produced in the Netherlands and France, where the merchant Lister had spent time on business) but disposing the decorative features in unconventional and naïve ways. Popular elements and motifs included curvy Dutch gables, exaggerated mouldings, unconventional arrangements of pediments and other details, and a disregard for the conventions of proportion. Although they disregard many traditional rules or guidelines of Classical architecture, Artisan Mannerist buildings can still have much vigour and charm.

A glance at the entrance of this building will reveal what I mean. Lister’s builder, who was probably a Hull bricklayer called William Catlyn, threw the kitchen sink at his design, incorporating not only round-topped niches on either side of the doorway, but crowning these with triangular pediments, outlined in pale stone. The round-arched doorway is also crowned, not with a triangular pediment but with a stone moulding that breaks into a semi-circle, topped with a carved feature a bit like a plinth or bracket for a statue, above which is no statue but a window lighting the next floor up. Elsewhere on the facade, ornamental stones bearing various geometrical carvings (here a diamond, there a square), are inserted. The undecorated runs of brickwork are laid with deep horizontal bands every half-dozen courses, to give the effect of rustication.

It’s a matter of taste whether one regards this effect as a provincial offence to Classical taste or a rich mélange. I belong to the latter camp, and can find much to like in the energetic effect produced by a local worker who was happy to pick up some motifs and run with them. Hull would be a poorer place without such a display.

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* William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was a hero of my childhood, partly because my mother came from Hull, where he was born, and partly because he was one of the people championed at my primary school. History in those days was often taught as a succession of great individuals (mostly, but not all, men) who had a major influence on the history of Britain. Such people included the engineer James Watt, the nurse and nursing reformer Florence Nightingale, the social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, and William Wilberforce. These historical stars were seen mainly in terms of specific shining achievements, and any negative aspects were ignored or played down. Wilberforce’s support for socially conservative moves such as limitations on gatherings of more than 50 people, the suspension of the right of habeas corpus, his opposition to trade unions, and his opposition to holding an enquiry about the Peterloo massacre, were quietly ignored. To recognise these views is not to devalue Wilberforce’s abolitionism, but to see the man whole. Neither is it an example of today’s so-called ‘woke’ attitude to history; contemporaries such as William Cobbett pointed these things out in the 19th century; today it’s still vital to realise when one’s heroes are not plaster saints.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Church side, market side

On the street called North Church Side, hard by Hull’s impressive medieval Minster, is the city’s Edwardian Market Hall. The building houses a market behind the row of ground-floor arches while the upper floor was designed to accommodate a corn exchange and a venue for concerts. In adopting this multi-purpose structure, the building is in the line of countless much older market buildings with an open market below and a meeting room or council chamber above. This Hull example also has a landmark tower – market proprietors and stallholders like towers that guide customers to the goods on offer. This tower, with its open upper section, concave curved cornice, cupola, and tiny lantern, has a baroque feel to it.

However, the main market building leaves the Edwardian baroque behind. Here the architect called on an array of motifs – the large windows with iron balconies, carved panels and cartouches, an area of banded stone and brick, a parapet with a segmental dip in each bay, and above all a doorway with an extraordinarily tall and etiolated keystone (see my photograph below), which, listed like this, suggest a mish-mash but which come together to make a satisfying whole. The person responsible for the design was Joseph Henry HIrst, a prominent local architect who could do grandiose baroque when required (his design for Hull City Hall is an example), but could also produce quaint half-timbered work (as at Carnegie Library, Hull).

The sort of mish-mash he devised for the market is usually referred to as ‘Edwardian Free Style’. It’s not as over the top as full-blown Edwardian baroque can be, not as restrained as the Jacobean revival that’s sometimes used for large buildings of the period. It has an unbuttoned quality that combines with the practical, usable market space to produce a good working building, something a great mercantile city could be and still can be proud of. A century ago, it must have buzzed with business; when we were there it still seemed well used.

Hull, Market Hall, doorway, serene in spite of notices and barriers

Hull, East Yorkshire

 

Names and textures, 2

Now for a sign that contrasts with the one in my previous post and makes a good excuse to look at one of my favourite street names. Yes, The Land of Green Ginger is the name of a street, a narrow one off Silver Street in the centre of Hull. There are various theories about the origin of this curious name. Some say that it is a corruption of ‘Lindegroen jonger’, referencing a junior member of the Dutch Lindegreen family, who lived in Hull in the early-19th century. Others suggest it derives from ‘Landgrave Granger’, because the Landgrave family nearby. I am always suspicious of derivations that are said to be ‘corruptions’ of ‘difficult’ words and prefer the simpler explanation that, in this great shipping and trading city (a cosmopolitan place where ‘unusual’ names must have been common), valuable spices like ginger were sold nearby.

The sign itself is an elegant one that uses a serif letterform which fills the name plate so that there’s very little free space around the words. Such is the clarity of the letters, though, that the sign doesn’t look crowded and is perfectly legible. The size of the sign has been well specified to sit comfortably on its strip of masonry. The dark background of the name plate and the thickness of the material mean it stands proud slightly as is easy to spot.

But what an extraordinary wall it’s set on. This building was designed in 1907 by Dunn and Watson for the National Provincial Bank. Built in 1907, its Portland stone walls are finished with an effect called banded rustication – the masonry is arranged in bands that have deep grooves between them, giving a striking stripey look in full sun. But this rustication goes further than most. Many of the bands are pulvinated – in other words they have a convex curved profile. The gaps between the bands are very deep and there are concave mouldings within each band; the ends of the bands are carefully chamfered or curved. A lot of trouble has been taken with this masonry, including the way the bands turn to embrace the keystone above the window. Another striking feature is the Celtic knot design on the square block above the keystone. Once more in Hull, name and texture, surprising for different reasons, sit well together.