Friday, July 11, 2014

Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire


A world of wood

Perhaps it should be one of the rules for the architectural traveller. As well as ‘Look up’, ‘Walk along alleys’, and ‘Go around the back’, the axiom ‘Look over walls’ has a place in the inquisitive traveller’s rule book. I am often to be seen looking over walls, in search of unusual outbuildings, garden structures, and other buildings likewise hidden from immediate view. Here’s an example from Shipston-on-Stour, the upper half of which, at least, is freely visible above a brick garden wall. It seems to be an octagonal wooden gazebo or summer house, with Gothic style pointed windows and walls made up of short logs arranged in geometric patterns. There’s a lovely fish-scale roof, too.

I don’t know how old this building is. Self-consciously rustic garden buildings go back at least to the 18th century, and they owe their form to various sources, from writers’ ideas about the earliest building of all (the ‘primal hut’) to hermitages, or people’s ideas about what a hermitage should be like. In a setting of trees, a brick wall and passing pedestrians, inquisitive or not, this wooden wonder enlivens the streetscape – and brightened up a dull day as I passed.


5 comments:

Peter Ashley said...

You're so right about the fascination in seeing just part of something over a wall. Or a hedge. In the years I drove down the A2 to my home in Kent I saw something on the left that was very similar in appearance to your Shipston find. Somewhere near Dartford, I never got round to seeing what it was.

Philip Wilkinson said...

Ah yes. Poking about in prickly hedges. Perilous work, but sometimes satisfying...

Joseph Biddulph (Publisher) said...

I wonder if the "Hermit's Hut" in the Kings Weston-Blaise Castle Park in Bristol is still extant? Actually to get this rustic home-made appearance you need to be prodigal with wood and use some skilful carpentry! One "rusticated" canal boat on the Kennet & Avon at Bath also has a round door like a hobbit hole - sometimes you just kick yourself for forgetting the camera!

Philip Wilkinson said...

I THINK it's still there, yes - the one I know as the Rustic Lodge, although that may well not be its proper name. Must look next time I am in the Bristol area.

Monnaie said...

Lovable architects design..