Limestone is one of the most versatile of England’s traditional materials. It runs in a band from Lyme Bay in Dorset to a point north of Filey in Yorkshire, a belt of stone that has given us some of our most memorable buildings – the terraces of Bath, the cottages of the Cotswolds, the church spires of Northamptonshire. Where I live in the Cotswolds nearly everything in some buildings is made of oolitic limestone - roofs, walls, window frames, floors, pavements. For centuries, Cotswolders came into the world to the sound of water boiling in a stone fireplace, and left it to be buried in a grave marked with a headstone made of the same oolite.
Everyone who has been to the Gloucestershire Cotswolds has seen houses like this – stone walls, stone roofs, dormer windows, and probably a stone garden wall and roses around the door too. The one I show above is in a village full of them. But if you look closely at it you’ll see something slightly unusual.
The doorway of this cottage has a rounded top with zigzag carving around it and the semi-circular stone above the door is carved with crosses. In other words, this house has a church doorway – and that zigzag carving reveals that it’s a Norman church doorway dating to the 12th century. What’s more, Pevsner informs us that there’s another Norman doorway around the back. If there had been one doorway, I'd have guessed that it had been moved to the site from somewhere else. But a pair of church doorways suggested to me when I first saw this house that the building began life as a place of worship before being converted (perhaps in the 19th century) for residential use – there’s another, still functioning, parish church in the village. Now a reader with a connection to the village (to whom many thanks for the information) has put me right. Apparently the foundations of a former church are still visible in the field opposite: the doorways were moved across the road.
Here in the Cotswolds we’re apt to get a bit blasé about our stone buildings. They’re everywhere and it’s easy to let them become part of the background, ignoring their details, their colour, and their beauty. Surprises like this one remind us to keep our eyes open. And as we look, to prepare to be amazed.
8 comments:
I love your thought that the Cotswolder's life was marked out in such close proximity to the native stone.
Count me amazed!
And of course it touched everyone's life. For the majority, who worked on the land, the stuff was everywhere – you'll have seen ploughed fields on the hills where there's almost as much cream-coloured stone as brown soil turned up. And many craftsmen, even if they didn't work in the stone itself, were involved in something relating to it – blacksmiths maintaining masons' tools, woodworkers making pegs for stone roofing 'slates', and so on. I think I might return to the subject of Cotswold stone...
Red sandstone...the stone of liverpool and surrounding areas is hardly used anymore.I have used it on a couple of small projects and it just works in a way other materials don't...I just wish it could be used more as it partly ameliorates the harshness of the northwest climate.
Agreed!
Sherborne is the correct spelling.......
Anon: My apologies. Of course it is. I will correct the post. Thank you.
...although the Blogger programme that controls this blog won;t let me correct the spelling of the text under the little pictures that appear along the bottom, so it's still incorrect down there.
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