Upleadon, Gloucestershire

 

Light-bulb moment

’This is Forge Lane,’ says the Resident Wise Woman, doing some navigation with her phone. ‘Maybe that’s the forge.’ We have both spotted a picturesque brick building, lit up by the sun, with a nearby gate in which we can pull up and take in the architectural view. We’d both seen the old waterwheel and thought ‘mill’, but it could equally be an old forge. When we look properly we see old brickwork (Flemish bond, probably early-19th century); windows, partly blocked, beneath gently curving segmental arches; and an upper opening for loading or unloading. The windows have their original glazing bars, but two have a single larger pane, which is probably a replacement for an opening section with a pivot half-way up, widely used on 19th-century industrial buildings. I find the brickwork appealing to the eye, even though I know this is a building desperately needing maintenance. This sort of pleasing decay can make a building glow, like the last brief brilliance of an old-style incandescent light-bulb before the filament finally breaks and its illumination is gone for good.

A little research reveals that there was mill here, at the meeting-point of the River Leadon and the Glynch Brook, since the 11th century, but that it became a forge at the end of the 17th century, pig-iron coming from Newent, a few miles away, to be worked. By the early-19th century, it was rebuilt as a mill once more, and this is the building we see today – only the single-storey section at the end is a later addition. The corn mill ran until the installation of electricity at some point in the last century, when the building was used to make animal feed, finally closing in 1995. Has it been used since? For storage perhaps? Whether or not that’s the case, I hope it finds a viable use soon. It seems too good a building to lie idle and decaying, and the light-bulb could soon go ‘phut’. 

Sandhurst, Gloucestershire

Warm and cool, rough and smooth

There’s something very satisfying about the warm colour of Georgian brickwork bathed in sunlight, and if the bricks have been used to build a country house of delightful proportions, so much the better – even if, as is the case at beautiful Wallsworth Hall, those proportions have been somewhat skewed by the addition of an off-centre turret and a protruding bay (in harder, later brick) on the left-hand side. But houses grow and their owners have changing ideas about what they want, and I’m happy to accept these changes as interesting bits of history, revealing developing needs and new tastes. They don’t, for me, wholly destroy the beauty of the mid-18th century original, in which old brickwork is complemented by sash windows, stone dressings, and a rather pleasing row of three circular windows to the central attic.

More recent changes have had a less obvious effect on the exterior of the house. It has been for some decades the home of Nature in Art, the first museum and art gallery dedicated to art inspired by nature. It celebrates such art (both fine and applied) through a growing permanent collection, a programme of special exhibitions covering everything from botanical illustration to wildlife photography, an artists in residence scheme, and a range of courses.

Architecturally, what particularly caught my eye, as I approached the house, was the doorway. Here too, the sun played its role, bringing out the details of the bold pediment, with its chunky dentils creating a pattern of light and shade. It’s this detail, and the extraordinary columns that are striking. Just as the sloping sides of the pediment are broken by chunks of carved stone, so the columns are raised to a greater level of decorative splendour by three cubic stone blocks, again chunkily carved, which punctuate their Roman Doric smoothness.

What these bits of carving do is take us from the rational, 18th-century mode of classical symmetry to a the world of caves and grottoes. Look at one of the square sections of the blocked column closely and you see a cluster of rock-like lumps and facets, many of which have the chisel marks clearly visible to emphasize their roughness, interspersed with what look like icicles or stalactites. It’s the sort of thing that would be at home in a grotto in the garden of a great house like Stourhead, and translates us from the balmy sunshine to the shivering sound of the aria sung by the Cold Genius in Henry Purcell’s King Arthur. What a place to end up on a warm winter’s morning: delightfully different, but still contained within the classical proportions of the house as a whole.

Toddington, Gloucestershire

 

Help at hand

This AA box has appeared by the roadside a few miles from where I live. They’re a dying breed, these AA boxes, and seeing one that was new to me set me thinking about their history.

In the post-war period there were over 1,000 AA telephone boxes scattered all over the country. They were originally built to provide shelter for sentries on the staff of the Automobile Association, who could offer help and directions to passing members; they also contained telephones, from which the sentry could call for further assistance. The first boxes were installed in 1911, and by 1920, AA members were themselves issued with a key to open the boxes, from which they could call for assistance if they had broken down. Maps, a light, a fire extinguisher, and other equipment were kept in the box for members’ use.

In spite of their shortcomings for those who broke down far from a box, they proved popular. When a box was manned by a sentry, he would salute the driver of a car bearing the AA’s distinctive badge, and a camaraderie built up between sentries and members. But with the development of communications technology, the increase in vehicle reliability and other factors, the boxes fell out of use, were replaced or supplemented by more modern roadside telephones, and this whole infrastructure of members’ telephones was finally rendered superfluous by the rise and rise of the mobile phone.

There are now only 30 or so boxes, without their original telephones, remaining,* some of which are in open-air museums such as Beamish and Avoncroft. The example in my picture has been restored by the volunteers of the Gloucester and Warwickshire Steam Railway, a heritage line whose whistles I can occasionally hear from the town where I live. It was originally sited at Andoversford near Cheltenham and apparently was in seriously damaged conditioned before the heritage railway acquired it and restored it. Now it’s a welcome sight as one leaves behind the Toddington roundabout in the direction of the climb up the Cotswold escarpment at Stanway Hill, on the way to Stow-on-the-Wold. As once it would have been welcome to motorists who were lost, or in need of mechanical help, as they went their way along the local steep, curvaceous and often chilly roads.

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* A website here lists 32 survivors, of which 12 are in museums and one is at the AA headquarters at Basingstoke.

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Perennial

There are some buildings I never tire of looking at, and some of these I have blogged about more than once. One of my favourites is the abbey church of St Mary, Tewkesbury, a large building that just keeps on giving, with its Norman and Gothic architecture, its wealth of carvings and its impressive monuments. There’s even some outstanding 20th-century stained glass, to bring the story of the church almost up to date. One of the best features is the large central tower, which has been called the best Norman tower in Britain.

The tower probably dates to the mid-12th century, at the end of the long campaign of building that brought the huge abbey church into existence. The abbey’s founder, Robert FitzHamon (a relative of William the Conqueror) initiated the building process in the late 11th or very early 12th century, but died in 1107. The church was consecrated in the early 1120s, but the structure was unlikely to have been complete by this date.* The architecture of this period is chunky, with thick walls, round-headed windows and doors, and enormous cylindrical columns. But there was also much carved decoration, as one can see on the outside walls of the tower.

The lower part of the tower is very plain, but very little of this would have been visible when the original, steeply pitched roofs were in place – the position of these is clear from the remains of old masonry that trace the old inverted-V-shaped lines of the roofs. Above this level, things get very ornate indeed. There are three horizontal bands of ornament. The upper band has tall arches (some with louvred bell openings, some blind), with sides and tops carved in a chevron or zig-zag pattern. Beneath these is a narrower band completed covered in arches that intersect, producing a geometric pattern of light and shade. Further down again is another band, this time with tall, carved arches, displaying a different pattern of bell openings from the one above. All of this is the work of 12th-century masons, apart from the battlements and corner pinnacles, which are later.

There was once a spire, made of wood covered with lead, on top of this tower, but this fell down in 1559. Even without the spire, the tower is a magnificent piece of architecture, drawing the eye as one approaches from the west (the approximate viewpoint of my photograph), making a striking landmark from across the fields to the north, or providing a pleasant distraction as one glimpses the top above the shops and houses that cluster nearby. It could so easily not be here today. The abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII in the 16th century, but the locals bought the church from the king in 1542, and it has served as the town’s parish church ever since.† It still gives much pleasure, not just to worshippers, but also to those who attend concerts there, and to anyone who, as I do, savours its magnificent medieval architecture. 

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* Church-builders usually started at the east end (where the altar is placed) and worked their way westwards. The chancel, crossing, transepts, and maybe a small part of the nave were likely to have been completed by this date.

† The townspeople paid £453 for the church.

Down Ampney, Gloucestershire

Crockets

The architectural feature known as the crocket is something that is often viewed from afar. If you don’t know what a crocket is and can’t reach for a convenient copy of The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, I’ll do that for you. ‘A decorative hook-like spur of stone carved in various leaf-shapes and projecting at regular intervals from the angles of spires, pinnacles, gables, canopies, etc., in Gothic architecture.’* That’s how Penguin’s exemplary reference book defines a crocket, although in the vernacular, as it were, I might say, ’The knobbly bits that stick out of the edges of church spires’, and you’d get the idea.

The crockets on church spires are by definition far from the ground and it’s difficult to see their details. When you get your eye in, however, it’s quite often possible to spot crockets near to ground level, as is the case on the pinnacle in my photograph, which adorns a tomb recess in the church at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire. Close-up, you can see that a well carved crocket is far from being a simple ‘knobbly bit’: it’s a flowing, organic-looking decoration that must have demanded considerable skill on the part of the carver. Great precision and a combination of delicacy and strength were required to carve the 20-odd crockets on this pinnacle and the matching finial on the top. To make the whole thing yet more intricate, the lower part of the pinnacle takes the form of a narrow, straight-sided arch, beautifully formed and set off with pairs of human heads that peer at us from the late-14th or 15th century.†  

There was a lot of this sort of thing about from the mid-14th century onwards, as English architecture entered the phase known to historians as Decorated Gothic. Much of it has been lost to the effects of iconoclasm and time – in particular, anything with an image of a human was likely to face the wrath of 17th-century Puritans and be defaced or simply lopped off. This makes the small heads on this example particularly precious survivals. Since much medieval stone carving was also painted in bright colours, there may have been another loss. However, light from the nearby stained-glass window has supplied a hint of colour, bringing a glow to a small marvel of the carver’s art.

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* John Fleming, Hugh Honour and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Penguin Books (5th edition, 1999)

† If you click on the image, a larger version should appear, making some of the details clearer.

Sudeley, Gloucestershire

Forty years on

Exactly forty years ago today, the Resident Wise Woman and I were married in St Mary's, Sudeley. I have written about my memories of the wedding and this building before, so here is what I wrote when we revisited Sudeley about two years ago:

The small church of St Mary, Sudeley is unusual in that it is both a parish church and the chapel of nearby Sudeley Castle. It’s an easy walk from where we live and from where the Resident Wise Woman grew up, and partly as a result of that, we hardly ever visit the historic castle, let alone its little church. In fact until the other day, the last time I set foot inside the church was in September 1985 when the Resident Wise Woman and I were married. It was wonderful to tie the knot in such beautiful and historic surroundings, pleasant for guests to be able to take a look at the gardens on the way in and out, and delightful to have the wedding reception in the castle afterwards.*

The beauty of the place is obvious enough, I hope, from my photograph, and the architecture – standard late-medieval-style window tracery with the added touch of a delightful bell turret corbelled out so that it overhangs the west front slightly – clear too. The history is that the shaping force behind the church was Ralph Boteler†, (c. 1394–1473), 1st Baron Sudeley and Lord High Treasurer of England under Henry VI. He rebuilt the castle and the nearby church, both of which owe much of their architectural character to him, although both were severely damaged during the English Civil Wars. After a period of neglect and dereliction, both castle and church were restored for the Dent family, who bought the castle in the 19th century and employed Sir George Gilbert Scott and his master perspectivist (later an independent architect) John Drayton Wyatt to undertake the restoration.¶

It’s thought that Scott and Wyatt took the church back to very close to its 15th-century appearance externally, renewing the tracery of the windows, preserving or recarving the gargoyles and other carvings, and restoring the bell turret. The church was refitted inside, with new woodwork and stained glass, and Wyatt designed a new tomb to house the remains of Katherine Parr, the last queen of Henry VIII – she lived at the castle after she married its then owner, Thomas Seymour, after Henry’s death. The result is a delightful little church which could not have been better for our small wedding.

Another of Scott and Wyatt’s additions was what I assume to be an underfloor heating system, with warm air emerging through grilles in the floor. As we left the building the other day, one of us stepped on the grille by the door and it made a loud clanking noise. Straight away, I was back in 1985, waiting for the bride to arrive. Suddenly, the silence was broken by a clank, and she and her father made their way up the nave towards where I and my best man waited. Vows, music (Thomas Arne, Henry Purcell), speeches, cake, and the chance to talk to our closest friends and relatives ensued: much of this is all a blur now. But I do remember smiling a lot. I’ve smiled a lot since.

Four decades. Say it like that and it seems a long time. But time’s winged chariot has moved swiftly through more than a decade together in London and nearly three decades in the Cotswolds (with, for an extended period, a parallel life in the Czech Republic). For much of this blog, my wife has been referred to as the ‘Resident Wise Woman’ – a joke, a truth and a ploy for anonymity. In this post I'll give her her real name: Zoë. I’ve edited and, latterly, written, lots of books. Zoë has moved through careers in arts management and urban regeneration, bringing transformative changes to people’s lives in London’s Vauxhall area and East Oxford; more recently she has published two volumes of her poetry, with a third on the way.§ Together we explore many of the buildings that end up on this blog and Zoë’s eye wonderfully stimulates, provokes and supplements my own wherever we are. While I have always been interested in architecture, I am lucky that she has encouraged me in my belief that the small adjuncts to architecture (such as signs, odd bits of carving, unexpected fittings and fixtures), the seemingly random associations that buildings can evoke, and the interest of the most modest of structures (privies, henhouses, so-called ‘shacks’) can be as rewarding as the facade of a great cathedral or the drawing room of a country house. On we go, ceaselessly into the past, but with at least part of us determined to remain hopeful for the future.

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* Back in the 1980s, weddings in country houses and castles were not the big business they are now. The church was not licensed for weddings when we got married and I had to go to a Church of England office next to Westminster Abbey and swear oaths to the effect that I was who I said I was, which allowed me to obtain an elaborate ‘special licence’ for the occasion. Today, people get married in the castle often, although I’m not sure that, even now, church weddings take place here. ‘I think it’s mostly blessings,’ a guide said, when we looked around the castle.

† Usually pronounced ‘Rafe Butler’. He was ‘one of a line of rather distinguished butlers,’ as my school history teacher said, even longer ago than the events I’m recalling here.

¶ Wyatt and Scott also designed a school and almshouses in nearby Winchcombe, which were funded by Emma Dent, then owner of the castle.

§ Zoë’s poetry books are Owl Unbound and Fool's Paradise.

Fretherne, Gloucestershire

A class act

Visiting Arlingham the other say (see my recent post here) reminded me of an occasion maybe eight or ten years ago when the Resident Wise Woman, our son and I celebrated my birthday with an excellent lunch at The Old Passage, an outstanding fish restaurant (it closed after covid, alas!) by the River Severn not far from the village. On the way home we stopped at the church of St Mary, Fretherne, which was on our route. My memory of the visit comes back to me through a haze of good food and wine, but we were all mightily impressed by this glorious building, packed with stunning craftsmanship – stone sculpture, woodcarving, painting, tiling, metalwork. To me, there’s something hard and cold about many Victorian churches – the architecture may be very correct Gothic, but the result lacks the irregularities, winning oddities and rough surfaces that make many older churches so delightful. Now and again, however, I find a church that turns these ideas inside out. Such a building is St Mary’s, Fretherne.

From the outside it’s dominated by a wonderful crocketed spire, upward-pointing pinnacles, and steeply pitched roofs. The two-tone stonework is a mixture of toffee-coloured Stinchcombe sandstone and Bath stone dressings, the latter lending itself well to window tracery, carved detail, crockets and other ornaments. Most of these details are exuberant imitations of the architecture of the 14th-century as reimagined by the local architect Francis Niblett in 1846–47. Niblett is not well known outside Gloucestershire. He was the younger son of the owner of Haresfield Court, a few miles to the east of Fretherne, and did quite a lot of church and other work in the county. Fretherne, where he had a sympathetic patron in the upper-class clergyman the Rev. Sir William Lionel Darell, is his masterpiece. Niblett was a dedicated follower of the work of A. W. N. Pugin, who advocated ornate 14th-century Gothic as the style in which to embody ‘the beauty of holiness’. These were also the ideas that the influential clergy of Oxford and Cambridge were behind: out with Classicism (the style of paganism) and in with Gothic (the style of catholic Christianity*); out with the old spartan preaching churches of the 18th century, in with beautiful buildings that were fit for the sacraments and could move you to prayer.

Inside St Mary’s there is beauty everywhere you look. The intricately carved pulpit and font cover; the painted organ case and pipes; corbels and brackets carved with foliage or with angels playing musical instruments; colourful Minton floor tiles; a reredos dripping with miniature arches and shafts and framing a pyrographic picture of the Supper at Emmaus done by a local clergyman; a painstakingly painted and stencilled roof; elaborate hinged metal grilles that allow doors to be left open for ventilation; innumerable details meaning that there’s always something to see that you’ve missed before. This is a very special building.

For all this high-Victorian glory, the place certainly does not feel stuffy. The parish has embraced the eco-church movement. There is community planting in the churchyard – cherry tomatoes were on offer when I was there and parts of God’s acre are kept wild. And amongst the wildness the crocketed lines of Niblett’s beautiful spire rise above the yew trees, thrown into relief by the sunshine and leading the eye upwards to the clouds and the patches of deep blue in the summer sky.

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*By ‘catholic’, the Anglican campaigners of the 1830s onwards meant true to the doctrines of the ancient, undivided Christian church. They believed the Church of England to be a truly ‘catholic’ church.

Angel mural, Fretherne church, Gloucestershire

Arlingham, Gloucestershire

Round-up

I belong to a local Facebook group here in our corner of the Cotswolds. People post news, coming events, and other items of interest. If someone spots escaped livestock (sheep usually, occasionally cattle) on a nearby road, they put up a post with details of the location and before long another member who knows which farmer is responsible lets them know. Back in the Middle Ages, before the enclosure of land into small fenced fields, stray livestock was much more of a problem. Animals grazing on open common land wandered off regularly. The answer to this problem was the village pound.

If someone’s animals strayed on to your bit of one of the big open fields and you didn’t know whose they were, you could drive them to the pound, a walled enclosure in the middle of the village. When the owner found out what had happened, the creatures could be retrieved. Most village pounds fell out of use after enclosure of the land into the self-contained fenced or walled fields we know today, when stray livestock became much less of a problem. But a few pounds survive. The one at Arlingham is a rectangular enclosure bounded by walls of a mixture of stones – red sandstone and green pennant stone brought across the River Severn from the Forest of Dean, together with local lias. In c. 1870 when the pound was repaired, a fourth type of stone was used – recycled Cotswold stone from a demolished house, Arlingham Court, which once stood nearby. Amongst the reused stone was part of a window surround, which can still be seen among the masonry on the inside of the front wall (see photograph below).

To pay for the upkeep of the pound and presumably to provide feed for the animals if they spent long there, a charge was levied for each animal impounded. A modern notice lists the charges in force in the 1780s: 1 penny for a horse, 2 pence for a cow, 3 pence for ‘a score [20] of sheep’ and 4 pence for a sow. Quite enough, one would imagine, for an owner to look after their animals (and, after enclosure, their fences), to ensure that they would rarely have to pay up before driving a stubborn cow or pig back home.

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* Arlingham was enclosed in 1802, but the pound was clearly useful enough post-enclosure for these repairs to take place.

Arlingham, Gloucestershire

All about line

I’d planned to go over to Frampton-on-Severn, stroll along the enormous village green, and look at some favourite buildings. But as I approached the place I saw signs saying in large letters, ‘FRAMPTON VILLAGE FEAST – FUN FAIR’ and when I arrived the village green was full of roundabouts and dodgems ready for the big day. So I decided to push on to Arlingham, a village set deep in the River Severn’s most dramatic loop, and look at the church, which until now I’d not managed to get inside.

When I got there I found the church locked, but a telephone number on a noticeboard put me in touch with the key’s helpful custodian and I was soon inside. To me the most engaging of the many delightful things in the church were four panels of mid-14th century stained glass. Each panel shows a standing saint and the two in the photograph above* are St Mary and St John, both set against a rich red background within ornate white architectural frames. Both saints, especially John, display the slightly sinuous form of the body typical of the period: his head is tilted to the left, his upper body slopes slightly to the right, his abdomen is straighter, and one foot points to the right. This is not quite the stylised S-shape of some 14th-century figures, but definitely tends that way.

However, the feature of the figure drawing that particularly struck me was the depiction of John’s right-pointing foot and Mary’s hands. The foot has exaggeratedly long toes, unrealistic in their proportions but so carefully enough drawn that each toe has its nail delineated. Mary’s hands likewise have very long fingers and they are drawn with one continuous line to produce the effect of interlocked digits. I like this carefully executed but rather eccentric effect, as I do the other linear details, the face, the headdress, and the architectural adornments – crockets and finials.

And in this window there’s a lovely bonus. High up in the quatrefoil that fills the top of the window is a tiny but beautifully formed image of St Catherine, with her wheel (see my second photograph). This little portrait has more interesting line work, including the face (with its somewhat scornful glance at the instrument or torture), the patterns, and another long-fingered hand, holding the wheel. How pleased I was that my avoidance of preparations for the fun fair and feast and had led me to a small feast for the eye in these windows at Arlijngham.

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* Please click the photograph to see the details more clearly.

Saintbury, Gloucestershire

Relic of the Arts and Crafts movement

St Nicholas’s, Saintbury, is a medieval church sitting high up in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. As well as its medieval architecture, which includes a spire, unusual in the region, it’s known for its beautiful setting and some interesting 17th-century wall inscriptions. In spite of all this I’d not visited it before – on one occasion, I found the building closed because some restoration work was underway; one two others I couldn’t park nearby. It seemed the moment to try again. This time I found a space in the tiny parking area near the churchyard, left a note in the windscreen to explain where I was in case anyone needed me to move, and climbed the steps towards the church and its welcoming north door.

As usual when looking at a medieval church, my eye was caught by a few things I wasn’t expecting: some pleasant early-19th century pews with Gothic carving, a beautiful medieval font with an 18th-century cover (a potential subject for another post), a mysterious stone panel carved with flowers and crossed bones. There was also evidence that this church had been touched by the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1902 the church was restored by the Arts and Crafts architects Arthur S Flower and Guy Dawber, who worked widely in the Cotswolds.

Saintbury is not far from Chipping Campden, a cradle of the Arts and Crafts and home to the Guild of Handicraft led by architect and designer Charles Robert Ashbee. Ashbee also worked at Saintbury, reroofing the building and adding some gilded bosses and designing a fine chandelier, which is now on display at the admirable small Court Barn Museum in Chipping Campden. Ashbee’s follower Alec Miller carved the relief figure on Saintbury’s north door, shown in my photograph. Miller studied at the Glasgow School of Art and when he left in 1902, came to Campden to join the Guild of Handicraft. He taught his art in Campden and carved this small figure of St Nicholas in 1911. It’s a 20th-century version of the carvings of dedicatory saints (common in the Middle Ages), most of which were destroyed during the Reformation.* Nicholas is dressed as a bishop (his see was Myra in Lycia, on the southern coast of Turkey) and holds his crozier and his symbol, a ship in full sail, indicating that he is patron saint of sailors and those who travel by sea. The carving is unassuming but crisply executed and it’s a delightful touch, an indication of the dedication of the church and a reminder of both how important the Arts and Crafts movement was in the northern Cotswolds in the early 20th century and how the movement’s artists and architects saw themselves as working in a tradition stretching right back to the Middle Ages.

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* A figure of the dedicatory saint was often on display in the chancel.

Ampney St Mary, Gloucestershire

Portal wonders

As a pendant to my previous post about the little church of Ampney St Mary, which sits in a field between Cirencester and Fairford, here’s a post about things one can miss near doorways. Eager as always to get inside and look at the wonders within, I pushed open the church door and stepped inside to look at the wall paintings in the nave. When I had examined those I went into the chancel where I was immediately struck by the lintel above the small priest’s door in the south wall. Above the priest’s head as he enters is a profusely carved stone that is obviously recycled – the carving continues at either end into the mortar joint. This seems to be part of a cross slab, although what has survived does not include the cross that would have been carved on the stone, just the foliage that surrounded it.

How long has this been here? I don’t know. The chancel was extended in the 13th-century and as the carving looks early medieval, the lintel could have been fitted then. Maybe, however, it’s evidence of the church’s late-19th century restoration (again, see my previous post for more on this). Whatever the case, it’s a lucky survival that preserves a layer of history and adds a touch of charm. If I’d been less hasty when entering, I’d have seen a piece of a different cross slab at the church’s main entrance. Here it’s set in the floor and this time the cross is on the part that has been kept. Here the carving is very worn – it must have been trodden on many times – and looks as if it was always in much shallower relief than the other example, but the arms of the cross, with their decorative lobes, are plain to see (see image at the end of the post).

And there’s one more thing at the same doorway, among so many small and telling details in this building that many people will not notice. Incised on the door jamb one can make out graffiti – a pair of initials, a series of overlapping circles, and a design of a branched structure, perhaps a stylised tree, perhaps something else. The overlapping circles are almost certainly medieval and form the kind of design used to make a ‘daisywheel’ – a circle containing several overlapping arcs that seem to form the petals of a flower. Except in this case the circles are inscribed in their entirety, so the flower design Is hard to see. Seeing this at all is not easy in a photograph, but clicking on my image to enlarge it might help. 

Daisywheels are usually interpreted as apotropaic (or protective) marks. Designed to keep out evil spirits, they are often found at or near entrances; in houses, one can also see them near fireplaces, another potential entrance for malevolent forces. I posted about a clearer example of a daisywheel here. Ancient graffiti are fascinating, and one of the insights that buildings can give into the way religion and the supernatural were regarded in the Middle Ages. But they take some spotting. Here, they’re just one more reason to stay alert when you visit an ancient building.  

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* Why did the graffitist do it this way, then? I wonder if they intended to highlight the daisy wheel by colouring in this relevant lines.  

† For more on medieval graffiti, it’s worth seeking out Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches (Ebury Press, 2015) 

Ampney St Mary, Gloucestershire

Beaten tracks

Anyone who happens to glance to their right at a particular point when driving along the A417 from Cirencester to Fairford is rewarded with a glimpse of St Mary’s church, Ampney St Mary. This tiny medieval building is isolated in a field – you reach it via a path, which curves around the building from the north to the south side, where you cross a small bridge across a stream to access the churchyard. The church is actually about half a mile from the village – it’s slightly closer to Ampney St Peter, which has a church of its own. There’s always something striking about a church in the middle of a field. Why is it there, we ask, and where is the community it serves? The answer in this case seems to be that an outbreak of plague, presumably the Black Death of 1348, led to the abandonment of the church by the 15th century and the wholesale movement of the village to a hamlet called Ashbrook, which is where it remains to this day.* The building had to wait until 1907 for a restoration  (with further work in 1913–14), by which time church repairs were often a good deal more sensitive than those of the high Victorian period. Ampney St Mary was fortunate in that the architect doing the work was F. C. Eden, a man with Arts and Crafts interests indicated by his membership of the Art Workers’ Guild.§ Unlike many of his forbears, Eden did not try to “improve” the architecture of churches he restored, proceeding with a light and tasteful touch. A number of interesting medieval features therefore survive at Ampney St Mary.

In this post, I’l look at one feature in particular: the medieval wall paintings. As is so often the case with such paintings, they are fragmentary and hard for today’s visitors to interpret, but there is one survivor with more detail than most. This is an image of a man apparently sighting along something looking rather like a pole; a wheel floats above. The “pole” is probably the spoke of a wheel, making this character a wheelwright. The context seems to be an image painted as a warning to Sabbath-breakers. The ,medieval Catholic Church was insistent that Sunday was kept as a holy day. You were expected to go to church and people were generally forbidden to work. There are lots of documentary records of churchmen encouraging priests to insist that their parishioners attend church on the Sabbath. In 1213–14, Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton ordered the parish priests in his archdiocese to tell their parishioners to attend church on Sundays and not to go to markets. Other orders went out to ban people from working on Sundays. There were exceptions – farm workers looking after their animals, merchants travelling with their goods, pilgrims and others were exempt from the ban.† The Ampney image of the wheelwright at work seems to be part of a “Warning to Sabbath-breakers” painting.

A friend of mine noticed the very individual style of drawing in this painting, and asked whether medieval artists copied one another, or learned from books or manuscripts that were passed around. I replied that they would start as apprentices, as stonemasons did, and that they would first of all learn from their master (who might well be their father or another family member). They’d see his work, and the work of others, at churches on which they worked. Some might well have collected reference drawings too, and if they got the chance to visit a monastery, or even to work on a monastic church, they would take any opportunity they could to examine the illustrations in the monks’ books. For all this, no combination of heart, hand and head is the same, so a painter would evolve his own style of drawing, as this one did, as he provided a bit of social comment and moral instruction for the people of a remote Cotswold village perhaps 600 years ago.

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* Plague is a common explanation for deserted or transplanted villages, but it is by no means the only reason for tghese phenomena; a move to be nearer to good agricultural land, destruction of buildings by storms, and land enclosure are among other reasons why villages were deserted or moved.

§ Eden also designed church furniture and fittings, and stained glass hence his connection to the guild. He became a Fellow of the RIBA in 1922.

† For more examples of clerics complaining about sabbath-breaking, see Nicholas Orme’s excellent book, Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021).

Nailsworth, Gloucestershire

 

Sign of which times?

It’s always worth looking out for old signs on shops – not just the sign bearing the shop name or owner’s name, but also signs that advertise goods once sold there. There are still quite a few Hovis bread signs on buildings that are no longer bakers, and during years of blogging I’ve posted signs advertising goods such as Kodak film, Ariel motorcycles, Ty-Phoo tea and Ever-Ready batteries. Walking along the main street in Nailsworth a little while ago, another example caught me eye – this Cadbury’s chocolate sign above the door of a hairdresser’s.

I was particularly struck by this sign because it seems a cut above the usual stick-on plastic ones: separate letters clearly delineated in what looks to me a rather Art Deco (i.e. 1920s or 1930s) letter form, from a time before the familiar Cadbury’s script logo (with its curly ‘C’ and artfully joined ‘db’) appeared in around 1951. In the sign in my photograph, the word ‘chocolate’, with its capitals that diminish in size, also feels true to the 1920s. Looking online, I could find only few versions of this design among the many different Cadbury’s logos and packs that appear when you Google this subject. Online sources give dates as varied as 1906 and 1920. Whatever the exact date, I think this sign in Nailsworth is rather unusual. I wonder if any of my readers know of others like it still in their original setting?

Snowshill, Gloucestershire

Wolf’s Cove

The other week the Resident Wise Woman and I revisited one of our local Cotswold country houses, Snowshill Manor, a place we had not been to for years. Snowshill, a 16th-century building much altered over the years, is now best known fior the collection it houses, which belonged to the architect-craftsman-artist-collector Charles Paget Wade, who bought the house in 1919. Wade’s collection is so large that it fills every room and spills over every surface. There is one room full of suits of samurai armour, another housing a large collection of musical instruments, one full of weaving equipment and domestic appliances, an attic room containing many bicycles, models of traditional British farm wagons, and perambulators. The theme that unites these apparently random and undoubtedly diverse objects is above all their owner’s passion for craftsmanship in all its forms. Wade would buy broken items and learn how to mend them himself, in the process giving himself a deeper understanding of how they were made. So Snowshill is a three-dimensional portrait of his interests and obsessions. Stepping inside the house, more than any place I know apart perhaps from Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, is like taking a trip inside its owner’s head.

After the frantic plenitude of the house, it’s a relief to step outside into the garden, arranged as a series of courtyards by Wade, taking advice from his friend the great Arts and Crafts architect M. H. Baillie Scott. In a corner of the garden is another Wadeish eccentricity, a model village that he called Wolf’s Cove. Before World War I, Wade lived in Hampstead (he had worked with the architects Parker and Unwin on the garden city at Letchworth and the planning of Hampstead Garden Suburb). While there he had created in his garden one of the earliest outdoor model villages, and when he moved he took its buildings to Snowshill and re-erected them, adding more buildings and turning it into a sea port. Houses cluster around the end of the harbour, straggle up the slope beyond, and there is also a railway and station (invisible in my photograph, it is to the left behind the wall).

J. B. Priestley is his book English Journey (1934) describes visiting the manor and seeing Wolf’s Cove. He calls the village ‘boy’s play on a smashing adult scale, defying all common sense but glorious in its absorption in the exquisitely useless’. Priestley also points out that all the buildings (with the exception of the walls and jetty of the port) are moveable, and are designed to be taken down and put into indoor storage in winter. At the time of Priestley’s visit, Wade was making drawings for a possible castle to overlook the village, but that’s a project that does not seem to have got off the drawing board.

Wade gave up his architectural practice to concentrate on running his house and its eccentric collection, funding his obsessions with a private income, I believe. Making the buildings for his model village must have been a sort of surrogate architecture for him. For modern visitors, leaving the eccentricity of house for the quiet beauty of the garden, it’s one reminder that we have not quite escaped the bizarre magpie world of Charles Paget Wade.

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*Wade’s village has a claim to be the first of all miniature villages. This label is usually given to Bekonscot, near Beaconsfield (begun in the 1920s), however, presumably on the grounds that it has always been in the same location and was always a permanent construction, not one designed to be taken indoors in winter. However, if primacy of the idea is important, Wade should be given credit too.

Stroud, Gloucestershire

 

Place and taste

I was recently reading Adam Nicolson’s Sissinghurst, about the beautiful castle in Kent restored and lived in by his grandparents, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. Adam Nicolson is the third generation of his family to live there and its garden, also the creation of Vita and Harold, is world-famous. In the book, I found this very apposite observation about places: ’It is an article of faith with me that a place consists of everything that has happened there; it is a reservoir of memories, and understanding those memories is not a trap but a liberation, a menu of possibilities’.

This is very much how I think about buildings and its truth was exemplified when I saw this ghost sign in Stroud. Actually, it was the Resident Wise Woman who spotted it first, and I expressed surprise that, having been to Stroud dozens (at least) of times, I’d not noticed it before. ‘Pritchard’s delicious home-made what?’ we wondered, fancying that we could make out a hint of the first letter of the missing bottom line – could that be part of an ’S’, and could the answer be ‘Sausages’?

It does indeed seem to be the case that this was the premises of Walter Pritchard, butcher, and his two sons, Arthur and Jack, and that the family opened their business here in 1928, the sons carrying on into the 1960s. The shop front, with its elegant turquoise and cream tiles (a tiny bit of it is visible on the right-hand edge of my picture because the window extends around this side wall of the building), could well have been made for them – butchers often favoured attractive ‘hygienic’ tiles that could be wiped down with ease, though this one does not feature the animal tiles that some butchers went for.

For me, the shop has a more recent memory – it was until a few years ago a second hand bookshop, which always had a large selection of books on film and architecture. Quite a few volumes on my shelves came from here. So if some older residents think of it as ‘the old butcher’s’ and remember its sausages (for foods too are at their best local and distinctive), I remember it as a source of books about architecture. No doubt for some it has yet other associations, accruing to form the reservoir of memories that Adam Nicolson mentions.

Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire

 

Local industry

Many people visit the Cotswolds, and most of them come to see quaint limestone cottages and medieval churches, and to walk in the hills along the many waymarked footpaths, taking in stunning views of vale and hill as they go. They come for rural beauty and tranquility, but many of them end up in the most popular showcase towns and villages, from Chipping Campden to Lower Slaughter.* They find find what they’re looking for, but also sometimes what they don’t expect, like surviving evidence of past industry, from cloth-weaving to corn milling, for Cotswold sheep produced wool from which cloth was made and Cotswold people needed flour to make bread. The area is crisscrossed by fast-flowing streams that provided water power for some of these industries.

So it was at Lower Slaughter, which is mainly a stone village that also contains this former corn mill, built partly of brick. There was a corn mill here at the time of Domesday Book, drawing water power from the local stream, the River Eye. In the 18th century, the mill was rebuilt partly in brick, and at some point steam power must have taken over from water, hence the chimney. The millstones turned to grind corn into flour until 1958, when it closed, no doubt unable to compete with larger mills elsewhere. From the late 20th century until the very recently, the mill was a tourist attraction, with displays showing the history of the village and its mill and where visitors could still see the round stones that ground the corn and the other mill machinery.

Although according to online sources, corn ceased to be ground in the 1950s, I’m sure I remember visiting the mill in around 1997 or 1998 and buying a bag of flour ground there. Perhaps the flour was ground at another site belonging to the then owners? Maybe one of my readers could enlighten me. There was certainly a shop and tea room on the premises until recently.

However, the mill is now closed to tourists and its future is uncertain. But at least visitors can still see its impressive chimney and water wheel, evidence that, for centuries, there was more to the Cotswolds than agriculture and quaintness. I hope the building finds new owners who can find a use for it and preserve it.

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* The name Slaughter has no macabre origins. It comes from an Old English word for ‘wet land’.

Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

Clean-up time

Beside the street opposite Chipping Campden’s 17th-century almshouses is this unusual feature. It now looks like a stretch of paved road that dips below the normal street level and it was originally full of water. This is a cart wash, and it dates to the early-19th century. Back then, mud could build up badly on cart wheels – not only on carts that had been in the fields, but on those hauled along rough and sometimes rutted roads or tracks. So the idea of a public cart wash was to enable carters to clean the mud off their wheels before entering the centre of town.

There was another use of the cart wash and this was to stand the vehicle in it for a while, to give the wheels a good soaking. Old-fashioned horse-drawn carts had wooden wheels protected by metal tyres around the rims. If the wheels got too dry, the tyres could loosen and fall off. Soaking the wheels was a way of making them expand a little, to tighten the tyres and keep the wooden wheels properly protected.

The world of horse-drawn carts and their maintenance seems remote now, but it’s not that long ago. I never knew my great uncle, whose business involved carting goods around rural north Lincolnshire, although my mother remembered him fondly. Just over a century ago, such people played an important role in rural communities, as did the men who built and repaired their carts. The Wheelwright’s Shop, George Sturt’s evocative 1923 account of this world of craftsmanship and toil, is well worth reading. Seeing Chipping Campden’s Cotswold stone cart wash brings it all back.

Chaceley, Gloucestershire

Worse things than serpents, or, Odd things in churches (17)

Finding this drum in a corner of St John’s church, Chaceley, made me wonder: was it some military relic,. put in the church for lack of anywhere else to keep it? Such an explanation seemed unlikely, in spite of the patriotic Hanoverian royal arms painted on the side of the instrument. The information available in the church offered a more likely story: that the drum was simply one of the instruments used in church music – it would have been played as part of an instrumental band that accompanied the singing of psalms, hymns, and the occasional anthem. Such bands were common between c. 1750 and c. 1850, before organs, harmoniums, and barrel organs started to become popular in parish churches. A common ensemble would consist mainly of stringed instruments (mainly violins and cellos), plus one or two woodwind – a clarinet, flute, and bassoon, perhaps. But such combinations were not fixed. In a small village especially, the church would get by with whatever and whoever was available.

This kind of instrumental accompaniment is sometimes called West gallery music, because the instrumentalists often played in the gallery at the west end of the church. The most famous literary evocation of such music is in Thomas Hardy’s novel Under the Greenwood Tree, in which the singers and musicians of Mellstock church (Mellstock is Hardy’s name for the real Dorset village of Stinsford) decry the coming fashion for harmoniums and barrel organs. Most of them agree that strings are best for church music, and some will admit that woodwinds have their place, even the unwieldy-looking bass instrument called the serpent (‘Yet there’s worse things than serpents’ as Mr Penny says). And drums? ‘Your drum-man is a rare bowel-shaker – good again,’ as another of Hardy’s characters puts it.

So if drum was available, a keen ‘bowel-shaker’ might well have been welcomed into the band. Even someone making a martial noise was better to the traditionalists of the 19th century than an organist or a player of the harmonium (‘that you blow wi’ your foot’). Bang on!

Stanton, Gloucestershire

 

Sheepdogs, or, Odd things in churches (16)

I can’t remember when I first went inside the church of St Michael and All Angels, Stanton, in the north Cotswolds, but I think I already knew the story behind the bench-end in my photograph. Perhaps I knew the story from the Gloucestershire volume of Arthur Mee’s series, ‘The King’s England’, probably the only book that my parents had that would have held such a historical tidbit: ‘It may be that when Wesley preached in this place there listened to him shepherds from the hills who would tie their dogs to the ends of the benches, which still have the marks of the chafing of the chains which held the dogs.’ Such marks can certainly be seen on the bench end in my picture, perhaps from the chains themselves or from a metal ring to which chains were attached.

Can this be true? It’s certainly plausible. For centuries, Cotswold farms were the sheep farms par excellence of England. For years I’ve lived in this part of the country and there are still plenty of sheep farmed around here. Shepherds might these days ride around on quad bikes or in 4 x 4s, and wherever they go their dogs go with them. In church, in the 18th century or earlier, one can imagine the chained dogs excited on their weekly meeting with the neighbours pulling on their chains and chafing at the woodwork before settling down quietly by the time the service began. We’re often told that Cotswold churches (like many in Suffolk and other areas) were built from the proceeds of the wool trade. It’s good to be reminded that none of that money could have been made without the people who raised the sheep – and the animals that rounded them up.

Somewhere in the Cotswolds

 

Corrugated surprise

There’s a way of thinking about architecture that puts building materials in a hierarchy of prestige and value. At the top of the list is stone, the material of cathedrals and palaces, a substance that requires great skill to work, is long lasting, and can be carved to produce the kind of ornament that sets off a grand facade or an imposing interior. Next in the order comes brick, also long-lasting, but mostly mass-produced; there are some major buildings in brick, but for those who think in hierarchies, brick has something of the everyday about it. The descending order continues with wood, and thence on downwards. The position of concrete in this league table is more debatable than most. But one thing that many people have agreed on is that buildings of corrugated iron come somewhere near the bottom of the heap. And of course I am here to tell you that this whole notion – the hierarchy itself, and the dissing of corrugated iron, is all so much nonsense.

There was a time when no one thought of corrugated iron buildings as architecture at all. The material is missing from most histories of architecture and when people consider it, it’s in terms of utilitarian structures like sheds, barns, and aircraft hangars – ‘tin sheds’ was the old deprecating phrase.. These days, however, corrugated iron is taken much more seriously. Its history has been researched, there are several books on the corrugated iron architecture,* there’s even a Corrugated Iron Appreciation group on Facebook. People who worship in a ‘tin church’ or live in a corrugated iron house can be proud of their buildings, and rightly so.

Recently I came across a small group of corrugated iron houses in the Cotswolds, little more than ten miles from where I live. I’d no idea they were there, and to preserve the privacy of their occupants I’m not revealing their precise location. I show one of them in my picture. It appears, to me, very attractive, cosy-looking,† framed by its well kept garden and screened from the nearby road by trees. The green paintwork helps it blend in – corrugated iron buildings are often green, a colour that works well, although I’ve also seen them painted almost every colour of the rainbow. The sun casts strong shadows and brings out the pleasing texture of ridges, although it was in the ‘wrong’ direction when I saw these houses to enable a photograph that really does them justice.

Back in the 19th and early-20th centuries, you could buy a flat-pack corrugated iron house from a manufacturer and have it shipped to your site. You needed to prepare a good base, lay on services like water and plumbing, bolt the frame together, screw on the sheets of wriggly tin, and add interior cladding, perhaps with insulating material in the gap between the inner and outer ‘skins’. Perhaps these houses started life in that way. Or maybe, since I’ve read about an old hospital somewhere near where these buildings are, they started life as part of that – corrugated iron hospitals were produced and constructed in a similar way, and were often used as tuberculosis hospitals in remote rural areas. However they started life, these green-painted houses still seem to be doing good service and have no doubt lasted longer than their original builders could have predicted. And that’s surely green in another important sense.

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* For example: Simon Holloway and Adam Mornement, Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier (W. W. Norton, 2008) and Nick Thomson, Corrugated Iron Buildings (Shire Books, 2011)

† Doubters ask if corrugated iron buildings aren’t very cold in the winter, and wonder whether rain on the roof makes too much noise. Some say that good insulation goes a long way to solving both problems.