Ilminster, Somerset

‘The war’

In 1940 long defensive lines were constructed running across southern England to hold up an enemy advance in the event of an invasion. These lines, made of barbed wire defences, tank traps, and thick-walled concrete pillboxes, were extensive, but they had weak points where access routes crossed them. One such point was at Ilminster in Somerset, where, in those days, the A303 passed through the middle of the town. Ilminster itself was therefore fortified, with a ring of barbed wire and tank traps, some earthworks, 17 pillboxes (each with a machine gun), and a heavy gun emplacement.  As well as the machine gunners, there would be riflemen dug in, and altogether about 400 people (up to half of them local home guard members) were needed to man this complex, defend Ilminster, and, so it was hoped, play their part in repelling the invading force.* Parts of this defensive line still exist. This pillbox is on a public footpath that once formed part of one of the long entrance drives to Dillington House, connecting the mansion to the town. The thick concrete has survived well, and the polygonal structure still looks fit for purpose. Eighty years’ growth of moss, plus some ivy, only help to camouflage the box.

When I was a boy in the 1950s and 1960s, local pillboxes in Gloucestershire were somewhere to play. We all knew they had been built ‘for the war’, but the reality, that, if we’d been boys 20 years earlier and things had gone differently, our own fathers, or, more likely, grandfathers, might have been risking their lives defending them, hardly impinged.† Seeing such boxes now (and experiencing briefly the temptation to ‘play’ with them in another way, imagining not the brutality of war but the origins of brutalist architecture) brings one up short, as I’ve been brought up short by reconstructions of the First World War trenches in Piccardy or by exploring the formidable defences put up in Czechoslovakia, to no avail, in the late 1930s in the hope of protecting the country from invasion by the Nazis. I hope I’ll never have to confront this brutality in person, and that neither my son nor my nieces will either. All politicians should look at such buildings, use their sometimes limited imaginations, and reflect.

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* Information panels on site tell the story of these defences. I’m indebted to them.

† Back then, c. 1960, memories of World War II were close for adults; everyone knew what you meant when you said ‘the war’.

Whitelackington, Somerset

Quietly showy

This is the west lodge to Dillington House, a mainly Jacobean revival house, now leased by Somerset County Council and run as a centre for continuing education, conferences, and other events. It’s a small cottage orné of about 1830,* sited where the drive to the house joins a bend in the road, its three ‘front’ faces looking out on the road and giving no doubt a useful range of views of the curve. It would originally have been occupied by someone whose job (or part of whose job) was to oversee and open and close a gate to the grounds of the great house. The accommodation would be small and basic – I’ve seen inside a similar cottage built for toll gate on a road and it was on the cramped side of compact. Polygonal buildings also have the drawback of non-rectangular rooms, which can pose difficulties with fitting it furniture, although these difficulties aren’t insurmountable. Many such buildings, if in use today, have been extended at the back.

This house’s Y-tracery, Gothic doorway, and thatched roof into which the upper windows protrude are all classic features of the ornamental cottage of the 19th century. The building is clearly meant to be a small landmark, telling visitors that they have arrived at the entrance to the grounds, and its ashlar masonry on the front walls, rubble on others, makes it obvious that it was always designed to be seen from the road. The ‘three sides to the road’ design is similar to that of other lodges not far from Ilminster, which mark another former way in to the house, but these lodges don’t have the thatched roof that makes this little house stand out. None of the buildings is grand. They’re not the kind of lodges that bring instantly to mind the phrase ‘trumpet at a distant gate’† although the gates in both cases are certainly distant from the main house. If a trumpet sounds, it’s fitted with a mute. The tune it plays is charming nonetheless.

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* For more on this kind of house, see Roger White, Cottages Ornés (Yale U. P., 2017), which I reviewed here.

† See Timothy Mowl and Brian Earnshaw, Trumpet at a Distant Gate: The Lodge as Prelude to the Country House (Waterstone, 1985)

Ilminster, Somerset

Stone and glass…and paintwork

Just out of the town centre of Ilminster is one of the few hints that’s there’s a big house close by: a pair of hexagonal gate lodges next to some stone gate piers. My photograph shows the right-hand lodge, which was catching the sun, warming up its local limestone walls and bringing out their slight orangey tinge here and there.

This is a building of the early-19th century, and guards one of the drives to Dillington House, a building originally of the 16th and 17th centuries that was hugely altered by Sir James Pennethorne in 1837. Dillington now hosts educational courses on all sorts of enticing subjects – as it happens I was teaching one of these courses last week, which is how I came to be here.

The lodges may well be of the same date as the Pennethorne remodelling of the main house. They are in the simplified Gothic style of the time – pointed openings, Y-shaped tracery to the windows, small battlements on top – that does very nicely for a small gate lodge. Buildings like this quite often came in odd shapes – circular, octagonal, or hexagonal – to catch the eye, to catch the sun, and perhaps sometimes because the design allowed the person inside to have a view in more than one direction, so that they could keep an eye on comings and goings.

However there’s an added twist to this building. The windows have the patterned glazing bars so popular in estate buildings in this period, but the window immediately above the door is a false one. There’s no glass there at all, just a stone impression of a window, to be decorative, with the glazing bars painted on to the masonry. A bit of trickery to remind us, I think, that this little lodge is as much as anything else a bit of architectural fun.