Burford, Oxfordshire, and beyond

Retrospective (2): A handful of fragments

As my next short sequence of backward-glancing links to celebrate ten years of blogging, I'm concentrating on fragments – those broken bits and pieces that can tell us so much about history – or occasionally fox us – while also being so evocative. Whether it's bits of medieval stained glass or chunks of old masonry, such unregarded scraps have often surfaced on the English Buildings blog over the last ten years. Here are a few you may have missed...

Tantalising bits of stained glass in Oxfordshire

Old bits of pottery put to architectural use in Northamptonshire

Traces of a mason's yard in Shrewsbury

A revealing broken pinnacle in Somerset

A whole wall of fragments in Gloucestershire.

Farthingstone, Northamptonshire

How Tudor is it?

Admiring the King’s Arms in the middle of the Northamptonshire village of Farthingstone (my photograph is taken from the churchyard across the road) I naturally wondered how old it is. The gables, dripstones, and flattened entrance arch all give it a Tudor or Jacobean appearance. Those distinctive lattice windows, though, look like a later addition, from the first half of the 19th century, perhaps. There’s a window at the side, shown in my second photograph that also has an early-19th century look, with Gothic Y-tracery glazing bars.

The facts are rather different. The building is actually a 19th-century neo-Tudor design, albeit done by masons working in a tradition that could still turn out Tudor-looking buildings in the vernacular without necessarily reviving the earlier style in a self-conscious way. They were conscious enough of their worth, though, to leave an initial H, for their surname, Hurley, on the middle gable. The carving protruding form the right-hand gable may be something reused from an earlier building.

The windows, by the way, are neither sash nor casement. They have clever pivoting sections, as you can see on the ‘Gothic’ example in my second photograph. The windows with diamond-shaped panes have diamond-shaped pivoting sections. It is as if the industrial age, in the shape of metal-frames and ingenious hinges (and indeed the rather hard-looking pale bricks that surround the ‘Gothic’ window) has added its contribution to this amalgam of Tudor and Victorian design. An interesting mix.

Farthingstone, Northamptonshire

Potscape

A row of early- or mid-19th century cottages is often an ornament on a town street or in a village. Gothic glazing with small glass panes, panelled doors, and flattened arches are all features that one might expect to find in this sort of row, and very decorative they can be. But here in Farthingstone, the builders had a different, possibly unique, decorative agenda. There's not only a winning combination of stone with brick arches, but also something bizarre: a multi-coloured collection of embedded pottery fragments, glass bottles, clinker, and oyster shells. Fragments of white, blue, yellow, and brown can be seen; there are whole cups in there, and bits of the necks of bottles. It's quite extraordinary, and even on this roughly north-facing frontage, where the sun doesn't get much chance to catch the pottery fragments, there's still a kaleidoscopic effect. One gets the impression that someone has seen a shell grotto in a landscape garden and decided to bring something of that kind of fantasy to a residential row using down to earth materials like old pots. And so, on a quiet village street, where one might least expect it, English buildings are calmly getting on with being eccentric. And yes, that does appear to be a model grey squirrel, legacy of more recent times, making its way along the wall.

The row: in shadow but glittering – click on the image to enlarge it