Compton Beauchamp, Oxfordshire*

For the birds…and the rest of us

One of the incidental benefits of church crawling is the other buildings one encounters on the way or near the destination. Before I’d even entered the church at Compton Beauchamp I’d already glimpsed the neighbouring big house (too private to photograph) and as I walked up the path to the church, this little building met my eyes almost at the same time as the pale chalk walls of the church itself. It’s a wooden dovecote, and is best appreciated from inside the churchyard, where it sits on the edge of its own small enclave, behind a yew hedge, in a part of the churchyard apparently set aside for one or two secluded graves. There’s even a nearby bench on which to collect one’s thoughts.

Weatherboarded walls, a roof of stone ‘slates’, and a tiny structure on top, too small to be a turret, too slight to be a cupola, too open and louvreless to be a louvre. Pevsner assures us that the nest boxes are still within, and one would be tempted to introduce a dove or three and see if they took to it. It’s said to be 18th-century, and what my picture above doesn’t show is that it is raised on staddle stones, those mushroom-like structures usually used to raise granaries away from the ground and impede the progress of rats and other grain-eating rodents.

Albeit unoccupied now by birds, this building is a small delight. If it’s a reminder of an unsentimental time when people removed the young doves or pigeons (known as squabs) for the cooking pot, it’s also a testimony to a way of building that could make even a modest structure pleasant to look at. We’d do well to have a bit more of that today. 

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* Formerly in Berkshire, while as a devotee of the old county boundaries I fell compelled to mention; also because it is still included in the Berkshire volume of the Pevsner Buildings of England series.

Staddle stone supporting dovecote, Compton Beauchamp