Alternative settlements (1)
From Turkey to Colombia, from Italy to Wales, there is a tradition that if you can build a house in a single night on a piece of unoccupied land then you gain the right to stay there: the landowner cannot evict you. Sometimes there is the proviso that for these squatters' rights to be secure, the chimney must be smoking by morning, or the table ready to serve up a meal, but the principle is widespread, and traced variously to Roman law, Germanic tradition, or some other ancient authority.
‘One-night houses’ are said to exist in many parts of England, on slivers of land by roadsides, on the edges of big village greens, or on ancient commons. At Hollybush, on the borders of Herefordshire and Worcestershire, there are said to be many, scattered apparently at random over the common. This building, in the middle of the common next to its landmark tree, a pale rendered cottage standing out amongst the green, must be one of them.
Such houses would originally have been timber-framed for the fastest possible build, with just the all-important chimney made of brick or stone, but have since been remodelled in masonry, rebuilt to last. They make their mark in a scatter quite unlike either the traditional nucleated village or the pattern of isolated farms that make up the majority of English rural settlement, so that if they no longer look as they originally did, these houses still provide vivid visual evidence of a once-famous bit of English folk law.
